The Gym Group: Customizing Rossum, integrating with Workday

Who are they?

The Gym Group is one of the leading gym operators in the UK, with over 800,000 members making 53 million gym visits per annum, across a network of over 230 sites. The Gym Group’s founding mission was to break down barriers to fitness for all with high-quality low-cost gyms.

The company has invested in new automation technology, helping their teams to run the business more efficiently. 

What was the challenge?

The Gym Group’s AP team were using a combination of legacy OCR and manual processing, which was contributing to a delay in processing invoices. The AP team also wanted to streamline the flow of data to their ERP to improve visibility of the data that was being processed by the team. However, the Finance Systems Team were struggling to adapt the OCR to their workflow requirements.

“Our main problem was a lack of control within the OCR solution, which prevented us from making changes in the system without external assistance”

Vivek Manivel, Senior Finance Systems Analyst.​

The Gym Group’s Finance Systems Team sought to replace their OCR software with a flexible, customizable solution that they could adapt to their business needs themselves. After a thorough review, they chose to work with Rossum, an intelligent document processing (IDP) platform, for its easy-to-use interface, customizable nature of the platform, and flexible approach to integrations. 

The solution – integrating Rossum with Workday

The Gym Group’s Finance Systems Team have advanced technical capabilities, so they chose to integrate Rossum with Workday themselves, with the support of Rossum’s technical experts.

The team designed an inbound integration, importing master data from Workday into Rossum and stored in data matching datasets. The other side of the integration exports extracted and validated data from Rossum to Workday in almost real time. The data moves between Rossum and Workday as an xml file and the integration also sends PDF copies of the original invoices for reference. The integration runs every 5 minutes, this window provides the AP team with almost real time visibility of invoices being processed.

Rossum’s technical experts supported The Gym Group’s Finance Systems Team with information on API structures and how Rossum accepts API requests, as well as providing extensive technical documentation via the Rossum Help Center to support customers.

The integration was quick to design and implement. Onboarding, AI training, integration set-up and testing took less than 5 weeks for Rossum to go live and start delivering value.

Customizations

The Gym Group’s Finance Systems Team have used Rossum’s pre-built extensions to customize the platform to their needs, this has saved development time and reduced the associated costs. The modularity of the system means the extensions can be combined to achieve the desired workflow outcome. The extensions also allow them the freedom and flexibility to implement customizations without relying on Rossum’s support team. 

To date they have used the extensions to automate the sorting of documents and routing them into different user workflows within the system, thus streamlining a process that was originally performed manually.  

They used another extension to set up PO matching, automatically populating some of the values and matching against Workday master data. The latest version of data matching, Master Data Hub, was fine-tuned using insights from The Gym Group’s use case and released into production for the benefit of all customers. 

“The latest version of master data matching is great as it has reduced the amount of system management time required from IT. We now have the flexibility to make changes with a much more streamlined process”

added Vivek Manivel.

The feedback and learning from The Gym Group has helped advance the Rossum platform, and the collaborative approach means all customers benefit from constant innovation which Rossum can easily deploy as the platform is cloud-native.

The Rossum IDP platform has improved invoice processing time and reduced the amount of manual data entry.  The Gym Group’s Finance Systems Team is also spending less time on system maintenance and benefits from Rossum’s support team for any additional assistance.