How Buhler Achieved 4.7x ROI with Yokoy
Head of Customer Success, Yokoy
With a history dating back to 1860, Bühler offers a comprehensive range of machines and innovative solutions for the food & feed as well as the advanced materials industry.
Their commitment to sustainability, innovation, and customer collaboration has positioned them as a trusted partner worldwide, serving customers in over 140 countries and contributing to the global goals of feeding the population, improving mobility, and protecting the environment.
Company overview
Uzwil, Switzerland
12’500 employees
Manufacturing & Technology
Yokoy Expense
Challenge: Multilingual and multicurrency expense reports push manual processing to its limits
Bühler Group is a Swiss-based manufacturing company that specializes in producing machines and innovative solutions for the food & feed as well as the advanced materials industry.
As a global company with over 12,500 employees and multiple offices around the world, their expense management process for finance administration had reached its limits, leading to frustrations.
For example as assembly work was often done at customers’ factories dotted across the world, manually chasing physical financial documents became a huge undertaking.
They needed a digital solution that could streamline and optimize their financial processes, all while automating their expense management tasks.
Solution: Yokoy processes expense receipts from across the globe - including China
Bühler Group chose Yokoy’s spend management suite not only because it is quick and easy to adapt to the company’s growing requirements and global operations, but it is also easy to roll out to further entities.
The Yokoy suite uses artificial intelligence and OCR technology to read and verify expense documents accurately, regardless of language or currency.
Thanks to Yokoy’s flexible API, the suite integrates into Bühler’s ERP systems seamlessly. Another decisive criterion in the evaluation process was that the tool can also be used in China.
Impact: Streamlined financial operations at global level
Bühler Group’s implementation of Yokoy’s spend management suite was a success. In just 12 months the company has managed to decrease the amount of hours spent on expense management by 58 %, thanks to AI-powered automation.
The entire spend process now takes an average of 2.53 days, resulting in remarkable cost reductions compared to the manual process.
on average to process expenses
different cost objects used
expenses processed within 24 hours
annual return on investment (ROI)
With Yokoy Expense, 46.7% of all expenses are processed within 24 hours and 79.66% within 4 days. The lengthy ordeal of expense processing, often taking weeks in other companies, has been reduced to just 6.49% of expenses taking over 7 days to process.
In 12 months, Bühler Group successfully processed 48,134 expenses with receipts from 25 countries, including China, India, Mexico, USA, and Turkey – with almost zero errors. These expenses were all accurately posted to 1,048 different cost objects.
This optimized expense process has already achieved almost 5x the ROI of the annual licence fees for Yokoy’s automation tool.
The implementation has already led to significant efficiency gains and cost savings, even though Bühler is still in the ramp-up phase and has only just begun to fully exploit the potential of Yokoy.
