Renewi was formed in 2017 following a merger of the British Shanks Group with the Dutch Van Gansewinkel Group. The company processes as much as 10 million tons of waste annually and turns it into raw materials for new products.
It employs a total of about 8,000 people, just under 200 of whom work at the Shared Services Center in Lommel, Belgium. This is also where the Purchase to Pay department is located, where Myrthe and Hans both work.
Unpredictable expenses
Four years ago, a major change took place in Renewi's approach to the Purchase to Pay (P2P) process. "Before, anyone in our company could easily order something themselves by picking up the phone or sending an email to a company," Hans outlines. "As a result, we were suddenly faced with an incoming invoice that we couldn't really do anything with but approve and pay it. After all, the goods had already been delivered."
Myrthe adds: "As a result, we had no idea what was coming at us. Will we receive ten or a hundred invoices today? Are we spending one or three million euros today? The costs only became visible the moment the invoice came in. Our expenses were not predictable."
Announce order with Purchase Order
So Renewi decided to change tack and move control to the front end of the process. "If you announce an order in advance by creating a Purchase Order (PO), the expenses become predictable and we can anticipate them better. That is very valuable for our business," explains Myrthe.
Reason for a phased rollout of a no-PO-no-pay policy for indirect costs since this year. This rule now applies to 300 of the total 10,000 suppliers the company does business with.
Hans explains: "Indirect spending is now done through a purchasing system. Orderers make their purchase request there. After possible approval by a manager - for small amounts this is not necessary - a PO is drawn up. The expense is therefore already recorded at the front, giving us much more insight and control over our expenses."
Not only does this provide more control over company spending, it also makes invoice processing a lot more efficient. In fact, if the supplier includes the PO number on the invoice, the invoice can be matched automatically. Manual entry, checking and approval is then no longer necessary. Quite a win, considering that the waste-to-product company had 330,000 invoices to process last year.
Suppliers deliver invoices differently
Suppliers submit those invoices to Renewi in different ways. "Together with ICreative, we ran an e-invoicing onboarding campaign with our suppliers. We wanted to make it clear to them why e-invoicing is advantageous not only for us, but also for them. The goal was that as many suppliers as possible would send us e-invoices from now on. And with success, because now we regularly receive e-invoices, including via Peppol," says Myrthe.
From those suppliers who are not yet willing or able to participate, Renewi still mainly receives PDF invoices via e-mail. Furthermore, suppliers can enter their invoices directly into the procurement and invoice processing system via a portal. Very occasionally, paper invoices still arrive by mail, but that is more the exception than the rule.
Receiving and processing invoices
All invoices not delivered directly to the system portal are automatically received and processed by Renewi with 4Exchange, a product of ICreative.
E-invoices arrive either through the certified 4Exchange Peppol Access Point, or through the mail. In the latter case, 4Exchange reads the mailbox independently. Upon receipt, e-invoices go straight through for automatic validation.
The pdf invoices take a slight detour and are first converted to e-invoices. To do this, 4Exchange sends the pdf invoices from the mailbox to Basware's Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. OCR extracts the relevant invoice data from the pdf document. After this intermediate step, these invoices can also proceed to be validated and possibly corrected.
"ICreative is helping us increase automatic matching rates and reduce manual work."
Validate and correct invoice data
"4Exchange validates the invoice data and supplements it when necessary," Hans explains. "This is very valuable to us. OCR does not work flawlessly and sometimes overlooks a PO number or other information, so that the invoice cannot be matched. 4Exchange corrects this and can indeed make the match, provided a corresponding PO exists in the system. In this way, ICreative helps us increase the automatic matching rate and reduce manual work."
In short, 4Exchange collects the various invoice flows, validates and checks the data and converts it to Renewi's desired e-invoice format. If a PO has been previously created for the order in question, 4Exchange also adds the information about the correct match. Thus, 4Exchange delivers the invoices ready-made into Renewi's invoice processing system.
Proponents of e-invoicing
"Because of all those different invoice flows, it seems quite complex now," notes Myrthe. "In practice, that's not so bad because a lot happens automatically and behind the scenes at 4Exchange. With the new legislation around e-invoicing, it will be a lot simpler for us. From January 1, 2026, companies in Belgium will be required to send each other e-invoices. In the Netherlands, this will also be the case by 2028 at the latest. That means that paper and PDF invoices will disappear. I believe this is going to help us tremendously, because e-invoicing means a lot less administrative work."
"I also support e-invoicing," Hans hooks up. "E-invoicing makes the whole process clearer, faster and error-free. We are completely ready for it, thanks to 4Exchange. As an individual company, you cannot submit or receive your invoices directly to Peppol. For that, you need a partner like ICreative, with Peppol Access Point. They make sure that the invoices from Peppol arrive neatly in the invoice processing system."
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