"At the touch of a button, we have visibility, control and put the invoice through."

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It's safe to call them the "heavy hitters" of Pon Holding: Pon Equipment and Pon Power. The former is active in rental, leasing and maintenance of earthmoving machines, bulldozers and asphalt pavers, among other things. Pon Power supplies and maintains generators, cogeneration plants and industrial engines.

The international trade and service organization Pon Holdings (manufacturer of bicycles and marine engines, and importer of VW, Audi, Porsche and Bentley, among others) employs a total of 13,000 people. Power and Equipment together account for some 2,500 employees.

In the construction of railroads and waterways, in shipping and offshore as well as in the supply of energy to companies and hospitals: in all these places you will come across Pon's heavy boys.

Digitize, standardize and centralize incoming invoices

Marc Engelen and Martijn van der Horst have long been the financial pivots at these heavy-hitters. Both companies took an important step for their financial administration by digitizing, standardizing and centralizing their invoice flow with Basware and Kofax software.

And it's about time, the two of them think, because both companies receive some 60,000 invoices every year. Varying in amounts from well over half a million for an excavator to a bill of a few tens of dollars for a few packs of coffee.

And all those invoices went through human hands before. Several people in the administration were busy with that and because it was human work, things sometimes went wrong. Sometimes an invoice got lost; sometimes an invoice was left in a drawer because there were questions about it.

Peace of mind in accounts payable

With the digitization of the invoice flow, that is a thing of the past. Martijn: "With one push of a button, we have insight, control and forward the invoice to the right man or woman. Contrast that with the minutes people used to spend checking an invoice."

Marc adds, "And accounts payable got rid of calls from suppliers calling about unpaid invoices, which in turn led to time-consuming searches. One glance at the on-screen display shows the status of each invoice, and shows who the designated contact person is."

Cost savings through automated invoice processing

The 30 or so employees in both companies' finance departments had quite a few questions about the automation move. Like whether this would cost jobs? Martijn: "The answer is no. This step did not cost jobs, but it did save costs."

"Accounts payable got rid of calls from suppliers about unpaid invoices, which in turn led to time-consuming searches."

The explanation for these cost savings lies in the fact that those who have to review and approve invoices can now do so much more quickly. And thus have time for other, smarter work.

Marc: "Previously, the emphasis was on data entry. That has shifted to more value-added work, such as doing analysis. 'How much coffee do we actually buy? Gee, that's quite a lot. Can we be smarter about that?' that makes the work a lot more interesting."

ICreative help desk has fast response time

The introduction and transition to the new programs by ICreative was almost effortless. Martijn found it an exciting moment: "We have a little train running here of more than 200 invoices a day, and you don't want that little train to be idle."

The way ICreative handled the hick-ups during the switchover was confirmation for Marc that he had chosen the right party: "They don't get nervous so quickly about going live, their help desk has a fast response time. It's nice to have a strong party behind you with sufficient knowledge and experience. Their calmness also gave us peace of mind."

Next step: matching invoices to purchase orders

Moving from manual to automated invoice processing was a "huge leap forward" for the companies. The quality of work went up, turnaround times went down. Meanwhile, both are already busy preparing 'the next step': "By automatically matching purchase orders with invoices, we can achieve much greater efficiency. That offers considerable administrative relief."

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