"Now only the scanning is left, after that Basware will do the work for us."

Intersnack Netherlands is part of a German family business. Business in the Netherlands is going well. They produce savory snacks and nuts under their own name (such as Chio, POMBÄR and Jack Klijn), but are also a major player with private labels. Customers include Albert Heijn, Jumbo, Aldi, Lidl and Superunie.

Especially the peanut butter is doing well. "Almost a third of the Dutch peanut butter comes to us from Doetinchem," Thomas says with pride.

Cozy atmosphere

He is at least as proud of the fact that annually some 400 million consumer units - i.e. jars, bags and trays - come out of the hands of his 460 Intersnack colleagues. These are divided between Doetinchem, where the head office is also located, Lelystad (snacks and production of own brands, which are growing 3x faster than the market!) and Hardinxveld Giessendam (packaging).

So a player of stature, but the atmosphere is very convivial. Thomas: "The lines are short here, it's easy to walk by to explain something." Employees from headquarters and the factory use the same canteen. "Then you sit next to someone from the factory and hear the best stories, I like that."

"We can handle more and more with fewer and fewer people."

Transition to Basware went silently

Those good contacts also came in handy when they switched to the more sophisticated Basware for their invoice processing. "It was right before Christmas. Everyone wanted to go on vacation, we arrived with our new package." Thomas looks back.

Still, the transition went fairly smoothly. There was a good plan, ICreative guided the process smoothly and all parties involved were well informed in advance. And if there was still a question, Thomas would stop by: "No distant mail or phone call, just at the desk. And then everyone turned out to pick it up easily."

Labor-intensive work disappeared

When Thomas started at Intersnack in 2010, the accounting team had seven employees. Now there are only three of them. Back then they were doing 100 invoices a day; now they do at least 150. "We can handle more and more with less and less people," says Thomas.

Many labor-intensive tasks have therefore disappeared. In the old situation, an invoice had to be finished from A to Z - scanning, encoding, checking, "overriding," matching, booking and forwarding - and that took at least 6 minutes per invoice. "Now only the scanning is left, after that Basware picks it up and does the work for us."

More invoices please.

As a direct result, Thomas and his colleagues can focus on other things. Like more analysis of lead times, for example. "There are still gains to be made there."

And they are in talks with suppliers to fine-tune the process even further. "We ask if we can get even more invoices. That gets a bit of a laugh, but that's where we want to go." Carriers sometimes send one collective invoice for perhaps 20 transports. "We have work to do on that right now. We want to move toward one invoice per purchase order. And in time, we need to move to XML invoices, which basically contain everything. Then our intervention will no longer be needed at all. Will that leave us with nothing to do? Not at all, we still have debtor management. For the three of us there will still be plenty to do."

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