A leading European eCommerce company was running crucial business processes on legacy applications — including a heavily manual invoice workflow that pulled data from PDFs and images into multiple ERP and accounting systems, driving up errors, resource consumption, and cost.
Invoices arrived from multiple sources in PDF or image format, and every one of them had to be manually read, extracted, and recorded into various kinds of legacy ERP and accounting software. At scale, that manual effort meant a high error rate, low accuracy, and a huge ongoing investment in staff time.
The Challenge
The client's teams had to extract data from unstructured invoice files and key it into several legacy systems by hand. The result was exactly what you'd expect from a process like this: high error rates, low accuracy, heavy resource consumption, and significant cost — all for work that added no strategic value.
The Solution
SmartView's goal with RPA is to deliver high quality, a productivity boost, cost savings, easy implementation, and speed — and this process was a perfect fit for automation. We solved it by combining RPA with OCR:
- All incoming invoices were directed to a shared mailbox accessible by the auto bot, using a standard subject line.
- The bot downloaded each invoice and read it with an OCR engine.
- Key data points were captured automatically — Customer ID, invoice number, invoice date, address, and total amount.
- The captured data was fed into the various legacy systems, where transactions were created and processed without human input.
The Results
Automating invoice processing with RPA and OCR delivered a dramatic jump in throughput and accuracy:
- Invoice processing increased from 800 to 6,000 per day.
- 95% accuracy achieved within the first 3 months.
- Workforce requirements were significantly reduced.
- Bots were scaled up within 6 months to process 10,000 invoices per day.
- The process now runs with no human intervention.
From 800 manual invoices a day to 10,000 fully automated ones within six months — with 95% accuracy and zero human intervention.
Legacy systems don't have to mean legacy processes. By layering RPA and OCR on top of the client's existing ERP and accounting software, SmartView turned a slow, error-prone manual workflow into a fast, accurate, and fully hands-off operation — without replacing a single core system.
