"My motto is: keep it simple."

Geveke's activities, besides advising, supplying and maintaining a wide range of technical products, consist of designing and producing complex turnkey packages including commissioning and startup. Geveke Mechanical Engineering and its two Belgian subsidiaries have two sales groups, industrial pumps and compressed air technology.

"Our products and services are essential to users in their production processes or operations," explains Michael Wiersma, CFO at Geveke Mechanical Engineering. "We are a trading company with our own service organization. We source products from specialized, internationally renowned manufacturers. For this we enter into long-term supplier relationships."

Managing everything in one application with Basware

The industrial service provider had been working satisfactorily with Basware for several years. When the then ERP system was end-of-life and Geveke Werktuigbouw started working with SAP Business One, it opted for another system to process invoices for cost reasons.

"My motto is: keep it simple. So we then replaced Basware with another package because of its good connection to SAP, even though we knew it was less rich in functionality," says Wiersma.

Over time, however, this proved insufficient after all. "It fell short, particularly in informational circulation. Too many things had to be arranged outside the invoice processing system via e-mail, while in Basware this is simply part of the process flow," says Wiersma.

"In Basware, you can control everything from one application where you keep an overview."

Carla Koning, employee in accounts payable, can wholeheartedly agree. "In Basware you can arrange everything from one application where you keep the overview. You open the invoice, you can send e-mails, you see how the invoice should be booked, and so on. In addition, Basware has a very nice search function where you can find everything in different ways. This really works so much nicer."

Automatically process PDF and paper invoices

Discussions with the supplier led Wiersma to fall back on the familiar through the known channel. He was and is very satisfied with the cooperation with ICreative, so a phone call for a demo was quickly made. "When we first selected Basware, we had already done an extensive market orientation. We didn't feel this was necessary to put so much time into this again.'"

In addition to Basware SaaS, Geveke Werktuigbouw has also chosen the additional ICreative Recognition Service (IRS) for processing paper and PDF invoices. Thanks to this service, information on these invoices is automatically read and automatically put into the appropriate fields in Basware. These include invoice date, invoice number, IBAN number, VAT number and/or net and gross amounts.

The basis for IRS is Kofax Total Agility software suite. Kofax has been named a leader in the so-called scan & capture domain by independent research firms for years.

Considerations in the final decision were pricing, which is substantially different with a cloud application, and the interface to the new ERP package. About a third of the total implementation time went into this. "The original plan we came up with was not going to work," application manager Jeroen Duindam informs us. "But we found a solution."

Setting aside time for testing phase is important

The remaining time was spent in setup issues, training and testing the application. The implementation was completed within the specified time and budget. What contributed greatly to the success was that Wiersma set aside a lot of time with his team for the testing phase.

"You don't gain anything if people can't focus their full attention on testing. If they are constantly distracted by daily tasks, then they are more likely to think it's okay," Wiersma believes.

Meanwhile, Geveke Werktuigbouw successfully completed the implementation of Basware SaaS in a turnaround time of about three months. "For us, December 10 was the deadline because we didn't want the implementation to coincide with the year-end closing. And we succeeded. We are now equipped with user-friendly, integrated application for our invoice processing," concludes Wiersma.

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