Smooth. Easy.
That is the first thing that springs to the mind of Carina Pedersen, ERP manager at the electrical engineering company Midroc Electro AB, when she extols the virtues of sending and receiving e-invoices through InExchange.
“There’s not a lot of work required on our part,” states Carina happily.
“Carina knows that everyone benefits from going paperless.”
This was the headline published in Midroc’s 2011 customer magazine Kontakt [Contact]. In the report, Carina explained the company’s future goals for all work, working hours and invoices to be registered electronically. “The age of paper is over,” declared the text confidently.
“We had a dilemma at that time when we were dealing with paper everywhere at the company,” Carina recalls and emphasizes how different it has been since then:
“We worked with personnel for many years to make the switch to digitization. It has been a mammoth task. There was a certain resistance to change in the organization.
But we have managed to get over the line. People now appreciate that everything is digitized. They understand the benefits of it all.”
Up to 85%
The business system solution that is connected to InExchange within Midroc consists of seven companies, of which Midroc Electro AB is the largest.
Being at the technological forefront in various ways is in the group’s DNA.
With that is also a strong desire to work digitally—and that is confirmed statistically.
“In total we receive approximately 270,000 invoices per year, across all seven of our companies, which are included in the business system solution connected to InExchange, and that number is going up all the time.
The vast majority of those are electronic. We are up to an average of around 85 percent,” explains Carina Pedersen, who stresses:
“This helps our work enormously. Before, we scanned all incoming paper invoices ourselves. Now, only a fraction are scanned.”
How important is it to convert the remaining percent?
“Our goal is to reach 95 percent in any case. It’s the final few percent that are proving the hardest to obtain, but it’s going well.
In principle, we receive inquiries daily from suppliers who want to send invoices electronically. Then it works exceptionally well through InExchange Network. Inquiries pop up in the network all the time.”
Easy with InExchange
InExchange, yes. Midroc became a customer of the Skövde-based e-services company four years ago. Carina Pedersen explains in more detail how the partnership was established:
“We had another operator from the start who was going to set up the management of electronic invoices for us, but that partnership didn’t work that well. It was a gargantuan task just setting up new channels for the customers we would be sending to. And making adaptations in our system, getting the correct file format, etc. was an unbelievably lengthy process. That is why e-invoicing was not set up when we commissioned our new ERP system in 2010. It was a project that lagged behind.
At the same time we were contacted by a seller from InExchange. To start with I thought: ‘No, we already have a partnership.’ We want to achieve our goal with this project.
But the longer it went on, the more we realized that it wasn’t working well.
We gave InExchange the chance to show their concept. We submitted a file in the format we have in our ERP system. InExchange looked at it and made a couple of small tweaks in order for it to work perfectly.
That is how the partnership started.” Were you surprised that it worked so well right out of the blocks compared with your previous experience?
“Yes, I was amazed. And I was most amazed at how it could be so complicated before when it was actually this easy. Had we known this before, we would never have gone down the other route,” summarizes Carina Pedersen in hindsight.
Midroc Electro is one of Sweden’s leading electrical engineering companies and has 52 locations nationwide.
The company carries out service and contracting in electrical installations, instruments, property automation, elevators, crane systems, communication, security, energy saving and mechanical maintenance. Midroc Electro is part of Midroc Europe and has a revenue of SEK 5.3 billion.
