Airline Company Slashes Invoice Processing Time

Industry

Travel & Transportation

Product

CMR

Process Automated

Invoice processing

+85%

Accuracy

-50%

Effort creating a bill in its financial system

-33%

Overall invoice processing time

Client Profile

The customer is one of East Asia’s leading low-cost airlines serving medium and long-haul routes. The customer’s goal is to make travel and the new experiences it offers, available to all.

Challenges

The airline receives approximately 2,000 invoices each month, each of between 100 and 200 pages in length. With over a thousand suppliers, these invoices arrive in a wide variety of formats. Every time the airline adds another destination, the volume of the suppliers and invoices to be processed increases and considerable time is spent manually extracting data from each invoice. The task of extracting data from each invoice and processing data into its BPM system is repetitive. Their pre-existing OCR platform struggled with the variability of the formats and required constant intervention. The frequency of these changes to these documents makes a template-based automation approach even more difficult and the company needed an AI-based solution that didn’t demand data science expertise.

Solution

Cognitive Machine Reading (CMR), a combination of AI, Machine Learning and pattern recognition, captures invoices from Service Now, a service ticketing tool. Emulating human data processing methods it extracts key data elements, categorises invoices and provides curated data for downstream systems. Built-in workflows route data to designated systems according to business rules. CMR automatically flags missing or unreadable information as exceptions and routes tasks to the right person. Each manual intervention improves the system’s accuracy and multiple reports are available for further analysis.

Results

After CMR was implemented, the airline experienced an increase of over 85% in their conversion accuracy rate, leading to fewer hours spent handling exceptions handling, while workforce productivity grew ensuring the correct payments were made. CMR reduced overall invoice processing time by 33%. The total effort to create a bill in the airline’s system was reduced by 50% and ensured on-time payments were made, leading to an increase in business processing efficiency. The transformation project underpins the company’s sustainability ensuring processes remain efficient as it grows. The airline continues to use AntWorks’ technology to create a highly collaborative, efficient and integrated enterprise.