GEK

TIS Increases Efficiency in Leading German Health Insurance Company

The Challenge

GEK (Gmuender Ersatzkasse) is a German-based health insurance company with more than 200 locations and 2000 employees. GEK has been chosen several times to be the customer-friendliest Health Insurance at Europe´s biggest Consumer Poll, the “Kundenmonitor Deutschland”.

GEK is currently handling 3000 FI-invoices a month and needs to process those invoices accurately, quickly and in the most efficient manner.

Before implementing TIS's solution for invoice processing, all invoices were manually distributed to the departments. The account assignment was made with booking stamps or payment authorizations. Then the invoices were sent back to the accounting department where they were booked manually and released for payment.

GEK is one of German's largest health insurance companies, and is constantly trying to supply even better services to their 1.5 million customers. Operating in a very competitive market, GEK needed to ensure its outmost efficient operation.

Before deciding on TIS's technology, GEK carried out a careful benchmark with other solutions on the market. This benchmark proved that TIS had the best technology to meet GEK needs.

Aiming to reduce processing resources and costs, while automating the process to improve its quality and speed, GEK selected TIS's eFLOW Ability to automatically capture, process, post and park invoices within its SAP system. Automating the process also enables the financial department to keep an overview of the process, thus avoid errors.
One additional target was to optimize the payment terms.

Implementing eFLOW

The project's kickoff was in October 2005. Setup time was two months only and in December 2005 the first batch of invoices was processed automatically by TIS's eFLOW.

eFLOW provides a single point of contact and control for delivering valuable information to enterprise information systems via a single platform and a single set of business rules. eFLOW integrates with any enterprise information and back office system.

The solution implemented by TIS in this case also included eFLOW Ability, a complete SAP-oriented business workflow and Accounts Payable document processing, approval, and validation solution that allows for an automated financial capture solution for invoices and related documents.

TIS eFLOW was designed to simplify data capture processes, reduce dependence on manual data entry and provide companies as GEK with data integrity and timely delivery.  eFLOW's flexibility allows for a quick adjustment of the automated solution to GEK's business practice and internal processes.

A close cooperation between TIS's experts and GEK's departments enabled the quick implementation of the solution. The IT department needed only to connect TIS's eFLOW with GEK's hardware, scan software and DMS system.

One Bell and Howell scanner scans all FI invoices and delivers them to the eFLOW platform, where they are captured and processed through OCR. The extracted information is validated according to business rules and against information that already exists in the SAP system. An important step that usually costs a lot of time in organizations is to identify the factual verifier. By rules that GEK personal can define depending on the extracted information the responsible person in the organization is identified automatically. Furthermore information that is relevant for the booking is derived from the extracted information, such as Cost Center and account.

Utilizing eFLOW Ability complete approval workflow, invoices are distributed to and are approved by the relevant cost centers or departments simultaneously. Invoices with and without line items are separated and processed in different manners. The system also process payment authorisations which, if captured accurately, are parked directly in SAP without human intervention.

All the documents are then delivered to the DMS-System and may be retrieved as need raises.

The Bottom Line

“This project has truly been a success. The delivery has been quick and the system seamlessly integrated with our business practices and infrastructure. We have been using the automated invoice processing system for 7 months and we are thrilled about the possibilities it opened for us. By using cutting-edge technology, we are able to provide better services to our customers, and we already consider extending the system to include additional applications such as MM invoices and an automated mailroom solution based on eFLOW, integrating also a digital signature for a complete audit trail and compliance with Bazel2 regulations," said Sabine Hachulla, project manager from GEK.

„ eFLOW's scalability and flexibility enable our customers and partners to expand the use of the platform step by step, project by project into the full enterprise solution. TIS supports customers and partners in implementing further applications on the same platform thus optimising their investment and improving their business processes in multiple areas" added Michael Schrader, MD of TIS Deutschland GmbH.