How Land Securities Group saves 92% of its document processing times with Rossum

Founded in 1944, Land Securities Group (Landsec) is one of the leading real estate companies in the UK.  Headquartered in London, Landsec provides real estate services for commercial and other non-residential buildings. The company has a £12.8 billion portfolio spanning 24 million square feet of well-connected retail, leisure, workspace, and residential hubs. From the iconic Piccadilly Lights in the West End and the regeneration of London’s Victoria to the creation of retail destinations at Westgate Oxford and Trinity Leeds, Landsec owns and manages some of the most successful and memorable real estate in the UK.

Landsec aims to lead the industry in critical long-term issues – from diversity and community employment to carbon reduction and climate resilience, the company delivers value for its shareholders, great customer experiences, and positive change for communities. 

The Challenge

Prior to the 2020 pandemic, Landsec was running a completely paper-based operation. The lack of integration and support for digital invoices arriving via email resulted in teams having to do around 4-5 operations on average at the preprocessing stage alone, with emailed invoices printed out in order to be processed. With the volumes growing, the company felt a big pressure to find an automated, scalable solution.

By the nature of Landsec’s business, various financial commitments and GRN accruals are very important. Another peculiarity of real estate is that one customer can have multiple tenancies, with each of these tenancies sending multiple different types of invoices. The Landsec team considered several different solutions, with template-based providers ruled out at the initial stages of the evaluation for their lack of ability to support the above-described scenario in a scalable and efficient way.

The majority of the vendors evaluated, whilst checking all the boxes on paper, provided a set of ununiformed solutions that weren’t communicating well with one another and weren’t built to work jointly in reality. The team found that most of the evaluated solutions handled the whole procurement aspect in parallel, outside Landsec’s finance system, with General Ledger data not plugged into a financial management system. The absence of reciprocity and API integrations made it difficult to respect and adhere to business requirements and regulations. 

Rossum came into the picture as one of the few AI cloud providers at the time. It was ultimately chosen over other strong competitors for its user-friendly UI validation interface and mature APIs that could easily integrate into Landsec’s processing workflow logic.

The Solution

Rossum’s solution went live just in time to help with the digitization before the Covid-19 lockdowns in the Spring of 2020. Thanks to the timely deployment, Landsec teams could keep on working remotely with minimal impact on the production process.

The first solution integrates the Rossum AI engine and validation screen into Landsec’s workflow and a proprietary app called ICE. Then invoices and credit notes arrive in a local inbox set up with logic to classify and determine whether the email has attachments. Rossum AI then picks up the documents to perform data entry and plugs them back into ICE workflow to perform a series of automated business checks and validation. The invoice is then ready for 3-way matching, after which the payment is triggered.

The second usage of Rossum infrastructure is currently being adapted by the AR team at Landsec on remittance advice, which was very hard to make sense of in the previous setup due to the multitenant nature of Landsec’s business partners. With the new setup, Rossum captures the data from the remittance advice, which can then be data matched to Landsec’s bank statement data, cutting out a large amount of the painstaking work for the Accounts Receivable team. 

The Impact

 The dramatic increase in the overall speed of throughput was of major importance, as Landsec needs to report back to the UK government on how quickly the payments are executed. Effectively, the SLAs are determined based on the size of the business partner. The smaller the company, the faster Landsec needs to make payments. 

Rossum’s fast learning and flexible AI prevented the Landsec team from constantly needing to onboard and tweak new invoices and layouts. With up to 92% time saved on manual data capture and validation, Landsec’s team can now focus on more specialized tasks and perform their work duties at least twice faster and more efficiently.