Civium is an Australian family-owned company. Since opening in 2003, it has diversified its business operations to now provide services in:
- Strata Management
- Commercial Real Estate Agency (Sales & Leasing)
- Commercial Property Management
- Residential Real Estate Agency (Sales)
- Residential Property Management
- Insurance Services
- Facilities & Building Management
In 2019, the growing Civium undertook a journey with solutions provider Winning Formula to deploy AI and robotic process automation (RPA) to deliver new levels of efficiency throughout the business, including in invoice processing, for its operations in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Canberra.
Challenge
As it grew to handle a growing volume of invoices, more than 150,000 per calendar year for thousands of properties under management, Civium found it was struggling with a legacy of manual processes in its financial operations.
Solution
The Winning Formula solution integrates ABBYY FlexiCapture with a range of Microsoft RPA, AI, and workflow tools to provide complete end-to-end intelligent automation.
After the invoice data (including line items) has been recognized by ABBYY FlexiCapture, the data is fed by robots to a purposely trained AI Natural Language Processing engine (utilizing Microsoft NLP capabilities) to “understand” the plain text line items and “interpret” which GL code they should be allocated to. Approval workflows are then initiated to gain required approvals from internal and external parties as per policies and regulations for each building and state. Digital approval workflows have been developed in Microsoft PowerAutomate.
Comments
“Leveraging ABBYY’s world-class capabilities in OCR/ICR/Doc Classification with Microsoft’s strong Document Storage, Workflow and AI capabilities, together with streamlined processes, delivered a great, scalable solution for Civium.”
Wassim Soliman, Managing Director, Winning Formula
“Being a reasonably small but innovative company, we had always invested in tech but never to the level, we have over the last few years. This was the single largest investment our company has made in 20 years other than acquisitions. I understand we are the first company in Australia to have combined AI in this way with OCR and RPA for invoice processing, which is ground-breaking and a testament to Winning Formula’s capability in this area.”
Doug O’Mara, CEO and founder, Civium