{"id":72941,"date":"2022-11-21T14:29:55","date_gmt":"2022-11-21T13:29:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.devoteam.com\/?post_type=success-story&p=72941"},"modified":"2025-04-11T15:01:56","modified_gmt":"2025-04-11T13:01:56","slug":"enabling-a-quicker-more-accurate-digitisation-process-for-unified-post-group","status":"publish","type":"success-story","link":"https:\/\/devoteam.info\/en-nl\/success-story\/enabling-a-quicker-more-accurate-digitisation-process-for-unified-post-group\/","title":{"rendered":"Enabling a quicker & more accurate digitisation process for Unified post Group"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The snapshot<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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1<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unifiedpost Group, a Belgian fintech company, sought to automate the extraction of key information from a large volume of customer invoices.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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2<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manual extraction was time-consuming, expensive, and prone to errors, hindering the company’s growth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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3<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unifiedpost Group built a solution that automatically extracts data with greater speed and accuracy, improving customer experience and reducing costs. <\/sup><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

About the customer<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Unifiedpost Group<\/a> is a fintech company and one of the biggest players in document digitization in Europe. Unifiedpost Group believes that administrative and financial processes should be simple and smart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Founded in 2001, the company has won Belgian Scaleup Company of the Year  from Data News, is present in 30 countries, and has over 1300 employees. Unifiedpost Group supports companies in processing documents and payments. They help their customers digitize their business processes. An example of one of those platforms is Banqup, where they manage everything related to invoicing for SMEs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem \/ challenge<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Document digitization is at the core of Unifiedpost Group\u2019 business. The Group handles procurement documents for over 400,000 small and medium-sized businesses and more than 250 enterprise players. The Belgian fintech company processes nearly 350 million invoices and other procure-to-pay docs per year across Europe. It’s of utmost importance that the information automatically extracted is accurate and reliable. Before switching to Document AI<\/a>, Unifiedpost Group used a template-based solution that needed a template for every document processed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were a couple of pain points in this solution that Unifiedpost Group was looking to alleviate:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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3 main challenges:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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1<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scalability – the template-based solution was not scalable. The extraction could not keep up with demand.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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2<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Handling of new templates – the extraction worked on a template-basis which was not very well suited for SMEs. There were a lot of customers which meant that there were many different templates to maintain<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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3<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Need for human review: One of the biggest costs was the human review needed for different invoices. Depending on the subscription of the customer, the extracted information was optionally reviewed by a human to ensure accuracy. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The goal <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Unifiedpost Group\u2019 goal was to modernise their template-based solution using AI technologies<\/strong>. This would remove the need for creating new templates and make it easier to support SMEs in their digital invoicing. Unifiedpost Group was looking for an AI solution that could make this document digitisation process quicker and more accurate. As they were ramping up their business in Europe very quickly, scalability and cost were 2 key factors in the selection of the AI solution<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall Unifiedpost Group wanted to use AI-driven processes and asked partner Devoteam G Cloud<\/a> to help them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The solution<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Unifiedpost Group was already working together with Devoteam G Cloud to roll out Google Workspace<\/a>, so it was a logical partnership to continue when they started to look at Google\u2019s Document AI solution<\/a>. Devoteam G Cloud helped Unifiedpost Group quickly set up a Proof of Concept on GCP to help them evaluate the performance of Google\u2019s Invoice Parser together with Google\u2019s product team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After seeing the results, Unifiedpost Group decided to deploy Document AI\u2019s Invoice Parser for their BanqUp platform. In order to ensure scaling to processing possible billions of documents a year, a fully serverless architecture was developed <\/strong>using tools like Cloud Functions, App Engine and Datastore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to lower the impact of this change to the rest of the Unifiedpost Group, the integration went through a proxy using Cloud Endpoints. In combination with the fact that Unifiedpost Groups application was already properly modularized, the change in tech remained transparent to the process of the full flow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As accuracy<\/strong> remains one of the main requirements for the application, Devoteam G Cloud also assisted in setting up Google\u2019s Human In The loop tooling. This allowed Unifiedpost Groups\u2019 labelers to verify any labels extracted by the Invoice Parser. In order to match the different pricing tiers that Unifiedpost Group offers, a custom routing application was implemented that combines the confidence of the machine learning model with the subscription type to decide whether or not a result should be reviewed by a human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Methodology<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Together with the Devoteam G Cloud\u2019s teams and Google\u2019s teams we worked for 9 months on implementing Document AI<\/a> from A to Z at Unifiedpost Group. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Devoteam G Cloud adopted the scrum methodology.<\/strong> The project was divided into several epics, which represented the major building blocks of the solution. These epics were in turn divided into smaller parts, also called (user) stories. Each story consists of different tasks that must be completed within a predefined period. This way we spread the project over several sprints, each of about 3 weeks, to finish some of the stories and get one step closer to the completion of an epic and thus the end result. This iterative way of working gave us a lot of room for feedback and testing so Devoteam G Cloud could make the adjustments in the project. The deliverables of the project were very clear for all the stakeholders which is key in such a project. These stakeholders are involved at fixed points according to the Scrum methodology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team organised daily stand-ups to follow up very briefly and get rid of blocking factors. This way everyone was kept up to date with the evolution of the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Result<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Accuracy Boost:<\/strong> Document AI increased accuracy by 250%.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Cost Reduction:<\/strong> Unifiedpost Group achieved a 60% lower TCO.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Enhanced Scalability:<\/strong> The solution now supports billions of documents and 150+ languages.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The solution provided Unifiedpost Group with great results:<\/p>\n\n\n\n