Implementation of Comarch e-Invoicing at Agfa-Gevaert Group

About Agfa-Gevaert Group

The Agfa-Gevaert Group is a leading company in imaging technology and IT solutions with over 150 years of experience. The Group holds three divisions: Radiology Solutions, HealthCare IT and Digital Print & Chemicals. They develop, manufacture and market analogue and digital systems for the healthcare sector, for specific industrial applications and for the printing industry. In 2023, the Group (including the Offset Solutions division) realized a turnover of 1,150 million euro.

www.agfa.com

Why E-Invoicing?

Having previously implemented different ERP systems at each of its divisions, AGFA was dealing with a heavy workload; thus, it was driven to find new ways of optimizing their business processes, providing better customer service and reducing operational costs.

Starting with just one of its four business units, operating within the scope of two European countries, Italy and Portugal (both of which have implemented their B2B and B2G e-invoicing regulations in 2019), AGFA decided to partake in the global e-invoicing revolution by joining forces with Comarch.

After a series of meetings, however, AGFA, impressed by Comarch’s performance and range of services, expressed its interest in expanding the scope of the project. With Agfa being active in more than 40 countries, the Agfa team decided to call on Comarch’s experience and knowledge to roll out e-invoicing worldwide. A coordinated project would save the Agfa team time in investigating the legal compliant requirements, speed up the implementation process and cut costs in maintaining over 40 different tailor-made solutions

"The complexity of this project lies in the high amount of countries (44), some of them having particular legal frameworks, and the different formats of invoices that are used by each of the AGFA divisions. This requires strong consulting services on the legal framework, and detailed mapping to align the formats and fields of the invoices for every division. This clearly shows the added-value of services on top of our core e-invoicing engine and customer portal. Comarch accepted the challenge and beat the competitors throughout the sales process."

Niels de Smet, Sales Manager for the Services sector in the Benelux

The Solution

From the very beginning, AGFA’s main requirement was to implement one global e-invoicing standard across its various business units with the use of a flexible e-Invoicing platform. The solution had to meet an extensive list of demands, one of which was providing an easy-to-use customer portal for invoice delivery.

Providing a fully integrated suite of advanced e-invoicing services, Comarch helps AGFA to send, receive, and archive its invoices in the most cost-effective way. The suite itself has been implemented and integrated with three separate SAP ERP systems. During the implementation phase, Comarch made sure that there was an intuitive, highly practical, and flexible way for AGFA to identify its different business units (and their corresponding countries) within the system.