Like the majority of modern companies with a wide network of branch offices and a large number of separate divisions, YUM opted to switch to the Financial Shared Service Center (FSSC) model. Delegating support processes to a centralized back office allows to cut operational costs while increasing the quality of results. For automating business processes at the FSSC, YUM decided to implement a data capture solution.
After trying out several data capture solutions, YUM chose ABBYY FlexiCapture, presented by ABBYY country partner in China — Shanghai Taibi Information Technology LTD. The project was implemented within 1 year, which included template development and testing, integration with financial system, the POC stage for small batch processing and, finally, full-cycle processing.
Today, the documents are scanned in branch offices with flatbed or high-speed portable scanners, and the resulting images are transferred through FTP into ABBYY FlexiCapture deployed in FSSC. The software automatically classifies the scanned invoices (VAT or shipping type) and applies corresponding templates to them. The relevant data are extracted and exported to the custom financial system developed by the company (ERP) with the help of a special module. At the same time the invoice’s PO number is matched to a contract in the YUM ERP system, allowing the financial department to double-check the payments.
ABBYY FlexiCapture has made this step faster and more reliable, with automatic recognition quality being higher than manual data entry. To increase the accuracy for critical data fields even further, YUM collaborated with Taibi Information Technology technical consultants to introduce automatic validation rules and additional methods of verifying and matching data.
YUM found the FSSC model of workflow organization to be the most efficient. ABBYY FlexiCapture collects and automatically sends the data to the joint processing center, where operators perform the verification. Thus, the FSSC not only helps to streamline the working process, but also saves time for documents delivery and minimizes mistakes thanks to the standardization and simplification of invoice processing.
At the first stage after the launch the quantity of documents processed by the system was 5,000–8,000 per day, later the volume grew to more than 20,000 per day. In the long term the company plans to scale the system to process even larger volumes.
