Kingfisher's GBS cuts SAP invoice indexing time by 90% with end-to-end AP automation

Who is Kingfisher?

Kingfisher is an international home improvement retail leader operating over 1,900 stores across seven countries in Europe. The company operates under major retail banners, including B&Q, Castorama, Brico Dépôt, and Screwfix supported by a global workforce of 74,000 colleagues.

Centralized AP operations for a retail giant 

Kingfisher’s Global Business Services (GBS) organization in Poland operates as the centralized hub for accounts payable:

• For 6 European countries
• 200 FTEs dedicated to AP
• Processing 40,000 invoices monthly (both PO-backed and non-PO invoices)
• 60,000+ suppliers

The challenge: manual effort prevents scaling 

In 2020, the GBS management, along with business leaders from operating countries, decided to implement an AP automation solution to minimize the time for invoices indexing – data entry into SAP – freeing AP resources for invoice processing (exception management) directly in SAP.

Each invoice required approximately 5 minutes of manually typing data from invoices into SAP ECC, taking their time from higher-value work.

• Accountants had to deal with varying invoice layouts in multiple languages.
• Growing invoice volumes would require proportional headcount increases, making operations increasingly cost-inefficient.

End-to-end automation with RPA and SAP integration

In January 2021, Kingfisher went live with Rossum after a 4-month implementation project. Despite initial reservations, the team embraced the solution after seeing tangible benefits to their work.

Kingfisher organized their solution into 12 distinct processing queues, covering their 6 operating countries with two invoice types per country: PO and non-PO invoices.

1. Invoices arrive in Rossum from centralized email inboxes
2. Rossum routes documents to the appropriate queue based on country and invoice type (PO-backed and non-PO invoices)
3. Rossum extracts invoice data, validates required fields, and checks for duplicates in line with requirements for each country.
4. Structured data is exported to RPA bots that index invoices in SAP.

Results: 60% touchless invoices

With 190 people using Rossum on a daily basis, Kingfisher has achieved significant operational improvements:

• 79% of fields are read automatically with high accuracy, reducing data entry time by four-fifths
• 60% touchless data extraction, with invoices requiring zero manual intervention before they reach SAP for further processing
• 21 seconds average annotation time for invoices requiring review or correction.

Thanks to the automated workflow, the GBS cut the invoice indexing time from 5 minutes to 25 seconds on average and was able to relocate 14 FTEs to further activities in invoice processing tasks.

“Rossum learned quickly and now reads 79% of fields automatically, and we have complete trust in the data it extracts. That means 80% less manual work for our accountants, so the team can focus on vendor queries, exceptions, and higher-value work instead of just typing data all day.”

Tomasz Pajak, Project Manager, Kingfisher GBS

Future

Kingfisher continues to implement Rossum for new parts of the business, supporting various projects, such as Coupa implementation and others.

The team is also implementing the new Rossum Aurora AI engine to drive the touchless rate even higher, building on four years of reliable performance.