The small accounts payable (AP) team at FibroGen, a biotech focused on developing therapies for chronic and life-threatening conditions, has been inundated with vendor invoices. Despite a recent SAP implementation that streamlined many operations, invoice processing has remained stubbornly manual and time-consuming.
FibroGen receives about 1,000 invoices per month. With a two-person AP team and an average of five minutes to process an invoice, roughly 500 hours are spent per year per person – or about 25% of total working hours – processing invoices.
Yet at its core invoice processing is just data entry with some important but straightforward business rules, like differentiating between invoices and credit memos. Invoices are received by email, typically as a PDF attachment, downloaded to a shared folder, then manually entered into SAP.
Needless to say, the process is ripe for automation with significant potential benefits to productivity, error prevention, and employee satisfaction.
Discovering Document AI
Fibrogen’s VP of IT Parag Govil is laser-focused on strategic cost cutting through innovation, including AI. After learning about Google Cloud Document AI and its Invoice Parser, Parag decided to pilot the service in collaboration with the AP team. However, FibroGen was new to Google Cloud and lacked a dedicated technical resource to implement the solution.
To fill the gap, Parag enlisted Fibrogen’s SAP partner, Deloitte, and Google Cloud to help design and implement a solution.
