With a history dating back to 1860, Bühler offers a comprehensive range of machines and technologies for various production stages, including cleaning, sorting, grinding, and extrusion. 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. 

Situation: High volume of travel and expense receipts from around the world

Bühler Group is a Swiss-based manufacturing company that specializes in producing machines and systems for advanced materials, grains, and food industries. As a global company with over 13’000 employees and multiple entities across the globe, the management systems for their finance administration became outdated, causing frustrations with expense management. Because assembly work was often done at customers’ factories, which were globally dispersed, manually chasing physical financial documents was a huge undertaking. They needed a digital solution that could streamline and optimize their financial processes and automate expense management tasks. 

Solution: Yokoy reads receipts from China automatically

Bühler Group chose Yokoy’s spend management suite because it was quick and easy to adapt to Bühler Group’s increasing requirements and global operations, and is easy to roll-out to further entities. The Yokoy suite uses artificial intelligence and OCR technology so that it can accurately read and verify all types of expense documents, regardless of language or currency. A winning argument, because for Bühler the decisive criterion in the evaluation process was that the tool can also be used in China. With the help of Yokoy’s open API, their suite seamlessly integrated with Bühler’s ERP system.

Impact: Streamlined financial operations at global level

Bühler Group successfully implemented Yokoy’s spend management suite, enabling significant improvements. In the first 10 months after implementing Yokoy expense, 1.807 working hours have already been saved through end-to-end automation. Today, the entire expense process at Bühler takes an average of only 2.53 days – an impressive efficiency gain of 435% compared to the manual process.

With Yokoy Expense, 46.7% of all expenses have been processed within 24 hours and 79.66% within 4 days. Thanks to Yokoy, the lengthy ordeal of expense processing that typically spanned weeks, as in most companies has been reduced to a mere 6.49% of expenses taking over 7 days.

A total of 29,589 expenses in 25 countries such as China, India, Mexico, USA and Turkey were automatically processed and posted to 1,048 different cost centers without errors.

The total savings achieved through the optimized expense process already amount to 6 times the investment costs in the automation tool from Yokoy.