Invoice workflow

Kirchhoff Automotive is a globally present development partner of the automotive industry and a full-range supplier for complex metal and hybrid structures for body-in-white and chassis. To achieve process unification, the company implemented xSuite's incoming invoice processing solution.

It is being rolled out piece by piece in the individual national companies, and new functions are being added. The family-owned company, which has existed since 1785, is part of today's Kirchhoff Group. With 9,000 employees and 26 production plants in eleven countries, Kirchhoff Automotive is the largest division in the group.

Until a few years ago, the individual plants in the various countries handled their accounts payable independently, and the finance departments acted more or less autonomously. The group of companies is growing steadily and acquiring new plants in the process. It is therefore inevitable that each site handles its invoice processing a little differently and establishes its own processes and logics.

For example, in the area of transport invoices, where the process chain "generate purchase requisition in SAP - approve - purchase order and delivery - subsequent invoice" was sometimes carried out differently. This can lead to additional work, especially if there are no SAP purchase orders.

Because then the question often arises as to who is responsible for the invoice release in the first place. Often, someone placed orders by phone that were then not reflected in SAP. As a result, goods were delivered that had no purchase order reference, and the search began to find out who the invoice belonged to.

As part of the implementation, Kirchhoff also established a Financial Shared Service Center in Portugal. "The plant there was best practice in processes. We could use this well as a blueprint for standardization in order to exploit synergy effects", explains Martin Jonczyk, who coordinated the implementation of the invoice processing solution from the very beginning.

Martin Jonczyk, Global Consultant for the xSuite solution at Kirchhoff: "The throughput times until an invoice was posted and released varied greatly. With the implementation of the invoice receipt software, a key figure system was therefore set up. This is now used to compare these processes in the respective plants with the aim of identifying waste."

75 percent of invoices as PDFs: At the end of 2020, the invoice workflow was activated in 13 company codes. 250,000 invoices per year are processed worldwide, 80 percent of which are order-related from SAP MM, and 80 percent of which are posted directly, provided there are no price or quantity differences.

Today, 75 percent of invoices arrive by e-mail in PDF format and are sent to a central mailbox in the Shared Service Center. There, the software first reads header data and then starts the approval workflow for the cost invoices from SAP FI. By now, 2000 people worldwide are connected to this workflow. They check the invoices via their SAP account and then approve them. The software takes over the posting after the last release.

Suppliers send the remaining 25 percent of paper invoices to the respective plant in the country, where they are scanned and transmitted to the Shared Services Center for further processing. Local SAP FI key users support end users at the plants and drive key improvements.

Accounting specialists can obtain a transparent overview at the click of a mouse: How many invoices are currently in circulation and where are they located? Today, such information is available in a standardized form within the SAP system. An external central key figure system was developed from this existing data, with which processes can be compared and analyzed, in some cases on a daily basis.

Even more valuable, therefore, is the information about how much work one has to put into processing an invoice. Because the simpler the process, the more invoices one person can process per hour/day. This is important against the background of a constantly growing invoice volume, which Kirchhoff Automotive has been recording for years in parallel with the growing business volume.

From the beginning of 2021, the automotive supplier also wants to connect its plants in Mexico to the workflow, followed by the plants in the USA and China. And technically, Kirchhoff wants to switch even more to XML and EDI formats. This will increase the degree of automation and further improve validation.