Product Information
Mercedes-Benz Mobility: How Does Enhancing an IT Landscape with AI-Based Technology Enable More Efficiency and Speed in Finance?
With operations in 35 countries, Mercedes-Benz Mobility AG enables private and commercial customers to finance or lease vehicles flexibly through rental and subscription models and fleet management.
The company’s existing accounting solution already enabled high levels of automated matching of payments to invoices. However, the accounting teams still spent hours every day manually identifying payments where there is missing or incorrect information.
To further improve the efficiency of this high-volume process, Mercedes-Benz Mobility wanted to harness the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable automated matching of unallocated payments.
Before: Challenges and Opportunities
- Invoice and payment matching processes characterized by large transaction volumes and complexity given country-specific payment behaviors
- Repetitive, manual work to clarify the correct customer accounts for unallocated payments
- Despite effective payment allocation rules, a lot of capacity tied up due to high volumes and manual effort
Why SAP
- Guidance and support from SAP® Services and Support for a proof-of-concept project for the add-on for contract accounting for SAP Cash Application software
- Self-learning functionality based on machine learning and artificial intelligence that enables SAP Cash Application to evaluate available information to allocate payments automatically, where payment details are incomplete
- Alignment with the accounting system environment that is based on the SAP ERP application, including the SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management solution, in terms of technical integration, user experience, and strategic direction
After: Value-Driven Results
- Significant increase in the number of payments that can be automatically allocated to customer accounts
- Faster, more-efficient processing of unallocated payments
- High expectation of further automation following additional AI learning cycles
- More time for accounting teams to spend on high-value, strategic tasks
- Planned rollout of SAP Cash Application across European countries
“SAP Cash Application offers the potential to transform the way we manage unallocated payments, helping our accounting teams work more efficiently and save time that can be spent on higher-value tasks.
The users are very impressed with the application and are actively asking for it.”
Michael Hermann, Head of Business Solutions, Mercedes-Benz Mobility AG
5-10 Minutes
saved for each invoice that is processed automatically on average
58%
of unallocated invoices forwarded to SAP Cash Application for clarification successfully processed, prior to any AI learning cycle