‍Working with Horizon Platforms, Data Scientists at the Hartree Centre North East Hub worked to replace manual invoice processing tasks with an artificial intelligence model to help save time and allow for room to scale.

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Challenge

Horizon Platforms is an employee-owned company supplying powered access equipment, including scissor lifts and cherry pickers, to businesses across a wide
range of sectors. Operating from its depot in Normanton, the company manages a fleet of over 900 machines and supported by a network of partners, delivers machines nationwide. Processing invoices against purchase orders is a manual process that can’t scale as the business grows. Horizon Platforms are looking for an AI driven solution to solving the growing invoice processing problem.

Approach

There were three steps to the approach. First the project team had to identify the different rules associated with invoice processing. This was done through a rules based approach in consultation with the Horizon Platforms. Once the rules-based framework was created the project team used the domain knowledge to develop a prompt that could deliver similar outcomes but with a multi-modal model. The final step was to demonstrate that this approach could be implemented using Microsoft’s Power Automate service.

Benefits

This approach outlines how manual processing of email attachments could be streamlined through automated identification of invoices and extraction of key data from PDFs for integration into the existing pipeline. Although the solution has not yet been implemented, it establishes a foundation for reducing manual effort and increasing processing efficiency in the future.

Further Information

This work was completed as part of one of our collaborative data projects. The projects are up to 12 weeks in duration and give you access to a wide range of expertise across our team of data scientists and data engineers. We will work alongside your team to scope your data science or engineering project, build a prototype solution, and explore options to deploy it within your organisation. You can learn more about them on our webpage here.

If you would like to learn more about the Hartree Centre North East Hub or our collaborative data projects, please get in touch with us at: hello@hartreenortheast.uk

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