How Veolia achieved 8x faster processing time with Rossum

Veolia is the global leader in optimized resource management. With over 178,000 employees worldwide, the French-headquartered company designs and provides water, waste, and energy management solutions. In 2020, Veolia supplied 95 million people with drinking water, 62 million people with wastewater service, produced nearly 43 million megawatt hours of energy and converted 47 million metric tons of waste, recording consolidated revenue of €26 billion.

The Challenge

A Shared Service Center serving 30 entities of the Veolia group struggled with inefficient legacy operation to post incoming invoices. The team was overly large and inflexible because the process was fragmented across entities. To solve these issues, the SSC launched a new vision of unified invoice navigation that aimed to centralize the process, increase digitization, and make an order-of-magnitude leap in efficiency.

The Solution

Rossum is one of the two key pieces of the new unified invoice navigation process, along with onboarding 60,000 suppliers to a digital non-paper process. Invoices arrive to a centralized entity-specific email inbox and is managed by a UiPath robot built by the RPA consultancy InnovationPath. Veolia’s AI Associates (the most technically savvy of the former Data Entry Clerks) operate primarily in Rossum’s validation interface to rapidly review documents and handle any exceptions. Rossum’s final output is a standardized EDI message which is paired with the other email attachments and sent to each entity’s downstream ERP.

The Benefit

The SSC leadership persuaded all stakeholders to dramatically overhaul the internal process, and the effort has certainly paid off. The SSC successfully implemented its new vision with Rossum and was able to cut down major overheads. So far, the AI Associates were able to speed up their processing by 8x, with time-savings efficiency reaching up to 87.5%.

The Vision

The new levels of efficiency allowed the SSC to be more ambitious in the services it offered, expanding the ambition from just data capture to providing an end-to-end intelligent document processing service. Rossum will play an important role in automating this stage thanks to its workflow engine and PO matching capability. The SSC’s automation ambition does not stop at 90% – it aims at 98% and will cover that ground both through new UiPath robot rules, Rossum’s EDI, and other supplier communication capabilities.