07/13/2005

SEEBURGER Inc. has collaborated with SAP AG to develop a new Add-On for mySAP invoice management system that automates the process of detecting and handling errors in incoming paper-based invoices. Combining SAP’s Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) with SEEBURGER’s Paper2ERP technology for electronic processing of paper-based transactions, the solution is intended for commercial release with mySAP ERP.

SEEBURGER provided the following details:

The system eliminates the manual procedures involved in identifying and reconciling the errors that affect 15 to 30 percent of incoming invoices today. With 70 percent of all invoices still received on paper and problems ranging from duplicate billing to missing or inaccurate information, invoice dispute resolution is currently inefficient, expensive, error-prone, and likely to cause complications such as lost discounts, late payments and/or poor vendor relationships.

The new Add-On for the mySAP invoice management will utilize the optical character recognition (OCR), artificial intelligence, and advanced data validation/exception handling capabilities of SEEBURGER’s Paper2ERP technology to minimize the need for manual exception handling by mySAP users. The system will:

• Scan incoming paper-based invoices via OCR; *Interpret and validate the data in each invoice by automatically cross-checking it against a knowledge base; *Post the results in mySAP as a structured XML document; and · Route exceptions through user-defined workflow for resolution before submitting invoices to mySAP’s Accounts Payable module.

SEEBURGER’s artificial intelligence will eliminate the need for mySAP users to create customized templates for each supplier, and it will also use automated learning procedures to constantly improve interpreted results.

In addition to reducing the time and expense of exception handling, the system will facilitate new business models such as outsourcing and company hub-deployment of accounts payable and invoicing.

“The new Add-On for the mySAP ERP invoice management system we are building will solve a major problem for enterprises, and underlines the vision of our Enterprise Services Architecture, as well as demonstrates how well known business processes also can benefit from new innovation significantly,” said Dr. Lutz Heuser, Head of SAP Research. “SEEBURGER is making key contributions to the solution with its data validation, artificial intelligence and automated paper-to-invoice technologies, extending a close partnership that has seen SEEBURGER’s business integration platform connect to our SAP solutions for over a decade.”, adds Archim Heimann, Senior Vice President, Global Solution Management, mySAP ERP.

“Seventy percent of supplier invoices and customer orders today still come through on paper, and that frustrates efforts by large organizations to implement end-to-end automation of their business-to-business transactions,” said Scott Lewin, president of SEEBURGER US. “By using our Paper2ERP technology to increase user automation in the handling of invoice exceptions, SAP is equipping its customers with an important new tool for increasing their productivity and continuing to streamline every aspect of their operations.”

SEEBURGER’s Paper2ERP application — enabling faxes and other paper documents to be processed electronically to reduce the time and error risks of manual data entry — is currently available as a stand-alone solution that can plug directly into any version of SAP R/3. Organizations that deploy Paper2ERP today will be able to easily migrate to the new mySAP invoice management system when it is released with mySAP 2005 later this year.