Data capture speeds Sony’s billing process

Sony Europe is automating the data capture of internal accounts processes and improving integration with central systems.

The company’s Global Treasury Services (GTS) division, which handles the internal banking needs of its European Group that includes music and electronics businesses Sony Ericsson and Playstation, decided that maintaining legacy IT infrastructure was no longer viable.

The unit has installed document capture software from vendor Open Text, alongside a Sony Europe-wide deployment of an enterprise resource planning system from supplier SAP.

 ‘The legacy systems we were using were getting too expensive to maintain,’ said Tony Griffin, senior manager for IT planning at Sony GTS.

Processing billing documentation involved the rekeying of data from invoices and laboriously
searching ageing mainframes for archived data.

‘We can now quickly convert invoice data, capturing an image of the invoice using Open Text and feeding it directly into the SAP system,’ said Griffin.

‘We managed to migrate two million invoice records in two weeks. Without the system we would have had to maintain our mainframe for another 10 years.

‘Other areas of the business can also search for invoice data directly through SAP, saving a lot of time,’ he said.