Fugro cut invoice processing time by 70% and scaled AP automation across 21 countries

Who is Fugro?

Fugro is a leading global provider of geotechnical, survey, and geoscience services headquartered in the  Netherlands. With a presence in more than 60 countries and over 10,000 employees, Fugro delivers essential data and insights that help clients design, build, and operate their assets safely and sustainably.

“Rossum has revolutionized invoice processing at Fugro. We’ve not only streamlined our business processes but also instilled a deep trust in our data and automation tools among our team.”

Ad Wijten, Global Finance Operations Manager, Fugro

What was the challenge?

The finance operations team at Fugro strives for maximum automation in their Accounts Payable processes. Unfortunately, the existing solution could not handle the variety of invoice layouts, didn’t learn, and could not provide end-to-end visibility into the invoice journey. As a result, 300,000 yearly invoices led to bottlenecks in AP processing.

“We were looking for a solution that could deliver true AI-powered automation to mitigate our challenges and be scalable across different countries in AP invoice processing. That’s when we discovered Rossum capabilities.”

PraveenKumar K., Automation Lead, Fugro

Business objective

Fugro was looking for an AI-powered solution that could handle a variety of invoice formats, provide consistent data extraction accuracy, and deliver a high touchless processing rate. They also wanted the AP team to be independent in using and training the solution. The ultimate goal was to scale automation globally across all Financial Shared Service Centers.

The team at Fugro ultimately selected Rossum for three reasons:

• Self-learning capabilities and AI: Rossum adapts to any invoice layout and delivers high accuracy after just a couple of invoices.

• Customization options: The ability to customize data extraction fields and create data transformations using natural language prompts.

• End-to-end invoice lifecycle: The ability to trace the whole invoice journey in one place and identify bottlenecks.

Implementation: Global rollout and use case expansion

Within three months, the finance operations and AP teams onboarded four Shared Service Centers globally. Since then, Fugro has onboarded invoices from 21 countries into Rossum, processing documents in five different language scripts, including Chinese and Arabic.

Rossum ingests invoices from the supplier portal and Outlook, extracts, transforms, and validates data, and then pushes it into the ERP system. Currently, three different ERPs are integrated into the solution.

Document translation

Multi-language AI support and document translation to validate invoice information in any language has also become critical to SSC teams that need to work with invoices from all over the world.

“The translation feature works exceptionally well, achieving a 98% accuracy rate with Latin documents, around 85% with Arabic, and 70% with Chinese characters. This upgrade has eliminated the dependency on language skills within the AP team, allowing us to translate any Latin language invoices with high accuracy directly within Rossum, thereby speeding up invoice validation.”

PraveenKumar K., Automation Lead, Fugro

Automated Supplier Communications

Fugro has implemented Rossum’s email autocompose feature to automatically respond to supplier status inquiries. Rossum reads supplier queries, checks the invoice status in the ERP and generates an email for human review before sending.

With 800 inquiries a month and every inquiry requiring 12 minutes, this feature saves the AP team 160 hours a month.

“With Rossum, we have built a truly global AP automation solution that adapts to the complexity of our Shared Service Centers. We automate 70% of invoices with high accuracy in multiple languages and provide reliable data to our ERP systems. Our AP teams now have a full view of the invoice journey”

PraveenKumar K., Automation Lead, Fugro

Results

Thanks to Rossum, the financial operations team has decreased the average invoice processing time from 2 minutes to 35 seconds, and it continues to drop. The team has already achieved an automation rate of 70%, with many regions consistently getting automation rates of 85% and above.

The AP team now has a complete view of the invoice journey and can correct any issues directly in Rossum before the invoice reaches the ERP.

“I love how Rossum reduces manual work and empowers our AP team to be independent.”

Shaheda Barokzay, RPA Business Analyst, Fugro

The future

Fugro has now onboarded most entities into Rossum within their Financial Shared Service Centers. The company now plans to:

• Continue improving automation rates and processing efficiency
• Continue expanding the use of Rossum globally and integrating more tightly with Fugro’s ERP systems, for example, integrating line-level matching.
• Integrate invoices from more languages, such as Japanese, into the solution