GCP – Unifiedpost and Google collaborate on Document AI to automate procurement data capture

Belgian fintech company, Unifiedpost Group has deployedProcurement DocAI to process nearly 350 million invoices and other procure-to-pay docs per year, in 15 countries across Europe. 

Procurement DocAI, which was announced at Google Cloud Next OnAir, automates the capture of invoices, receipts and other procurement data at scale. It takes unstructured documents across a variety of formats and turns them into cleanly structured data, increasing operational efficiency and improving document processing accuracy.    

“At Unifiedpost, we believe that administrative and financial processes should be simple and smart. Google Cloud’s Procurement DocAI solution helps us achieve that goal by providing the best in class document automation processing with high accuracy and global, multi-language support.” – Hans Leybaert, CEO, Unifiedpost Group

Large enterprise procurement and distribution networks as well as small and medium enterprises (SMEs) generate millions of invoices, receipts, and other related documents a year. These processes generate significant overhead for every procured item. With competitive pressures increasing, businesses are finding new ways to automate one of their highest volume business processes — the procurement cycle.

A key part of our strategy at Google Cloud is the creation of industry-specific solutions that address vertical needs. Cross-industry solutions like Document AI are built to plug into your existing workflows and deliver business results from AI without having to hire an army of AI experts, or manage cloud infrastructure to get there.

Procurement DocAI is one of our newest solutions, and it’s deployed by many customers and partners including Unifiedpost. The company currently serves 400k SMEs and 250+ corporations; their offering includes: documents (e.g., invoice PDF to XML conversion, e-invoicing), identity (e.g., KYC), and payments (e.g., IBAN accounts, online collection services, PSD2 payment services). 

With a large, rapidly growing, and heavily multi-language footprint, Unifiedpost sought the best industry solutions to meet their automation challenges and connect their customers such as Billtobox.com or JeFacture.com. Google Cloud’s Procurement DocAI delivered two key benefits to address Unifiedpost’s business needs:

• Lower TCO of procure-to-pay processing. Unifiedpost will be able to lower their TCO of procure-to-pay processing costs by up to 60% with Procurement DocAI. This solution provided them a cost effective approach for data extraction for invoices, receipts, and other valuable documents in the procurement cycle of procure to invoice, and invoice to pay.

• Improve procurement document processing accuracy. Procurement DocAI also helped boost data accuracy by 250% for Unifiedpost’s document extraction through specialized DocAI parsers with advanced OCR, computer vision, and Natural Language Processing. Additionally, Unifiedpost needed rapid multi-language expansion to enable regionalization support across Europe, particularly for French and Dutch to begin with, which Google delivered in less than a month.

The collaboration between Google Cloud and Unifiedpost is just one of the latest examples of how we’re providing AI-powered functional solutions to solve business problems by leveraging our Deployed AI approach.

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For more customer stories from EMEA, check out Google Cloud Next OnAir EMEA, which has tailored content to support the needs of our customers in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, kicking off from 29 September – 27 October.