Industry: Construction; Health
Use Case: AP & Finance;  Business Process Automation; Data Capture

What does the Beacon Hospital do?

Located in South Dublin, Beacon Hospital is one of the most advanced private hospitals in Europe.  Opened in October 2006, Beacon Hospital provides 24 hour, world-class acute care services with 210 beds, nine operating theatres, and two linear accelerators. With over 235 Consultants and 900 highly skilled personnel, the hospital treated over 110,000 patients in 2016 alone.

As well as South Dublin, Beacon Hospital has satellite locations in Wexford, Mullingar and Drogheda.

How did Beacon Hospital want to improve their business?

The Beacon Hospital uses an ERP system to manage the complex array of transactions that occur between the Hospital and its suppliers, consultants and various third parties.

Ian O’Keeffe is Beacon Hospital’s Financial Controller and he commented, “As one of the most advanced private hospitals in Europe, we have a powerful ERP system that is critical to the financial control, risk and planning for our business. But we wanted to get the data into the ERP system as quickly and automatically as we possible could, whilst at the same time improving the accuracy of the data. We felt that this strategy was the best way to further leverage the strength of our ERP system. In addition, we process thousands of supplier invoices per month and the manual nature of the data entry meant that the process was slow, costly and error prone and was causing delays in payments to key vendors.

Ian and his team decided they needed to automate and digitise these manual processes of data entry and extraction in order to eliminate printing, data entry and manual handling of invoices in order to shorten the entire AP invoice approval process and free up valuable resources.

What solution was implemented?

Convergent was chosen to implement their Data Capture & Extraction solution for this project.

Commenting on this decision, Ian continued, “We were hoping for an accuracy level of around 70% for extracted data because that’s what we were led to believe the industry norm was, but when Convergent were able to achieve 97% from our invoices using their solution the decision to choose Convergent was an easy one. The accuracy of the data captured from our invoices was one of the most important requirement for us because incorrect information had the potential to increase our financial risk. In addition, Convergent’s Data Capture & Extraction solution was also robust and durable not only to handle the volume of invoice data we needed to process, but also the different ways the invoices could be received.”

The solution configured for Beacon Hospital by Convergent:

• digitises key supplier invoices
• automatically recognises the Supplier and extracts the required data from the invoice
• extracts the line item detail from the invoice
• migrates the extracted invoice and line item data in xml format to Sage X3, as well as the invoice image, where it gets matched to a P.O.
• eliminates the requirement for paper and email
• eliminates all manual invoice data entry