Automating Invoice Management at Heylen Group via SAP VIM

About Heylen Group

Heylen Group is a Belgian investment company with a diverse portfolio spanning real estate, logistics, manufacturing, and technology. One of its key entities, Heylen Warehouses, specializes in the development and management of logistics and industrial real estate and has become a leading player in the Benelux region. Together, they manage over 150 legal entities within a shared SAP landscape.

The Challenge: need for visibility and control over invoice processing flow

As Heylen Group expanded, its growing number of legal entities made managing accounts payable increasingly complex:

• Manual and time-consuming invoice handling (lots of back-and-forth mailing)
• Complex custom-built workflows for invoice approval, escalation and exception handling
• Limited real-time visibility on invoice statuses and financial data
• Long invoice processing times
• Managing over 150 company codes

The result was a process that required significant manual effort, created room for human error, and made it difficult to maintain visibility and control. To tackle these challenges, Heylen Group turned to Alluvion to help design and implement a scalable and automated solution, leveraging our deep expertise in Vendor Invoice Management (VIM).

The Solution: SAP Vendor Invoice Management by Alluvion

Through multiple workshops between Alluvion and Heylen Group stakeholders, the company structure and specific needs for invoice automation were uncovered and defined. These findings enabled Alluvion to carry out a successful SAP Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) implementation, supported by Intelligent Capture for SAP (IC4SAP) for automated invoice recognition and validation.

The project included a full end-to-end VIM implementation, covering:

1. VIM Foundation

2. VIM Invoice Solution

3. IC4SAP integration

To tailor the invoice processing solution to Heylen Group’s structure and governance requirements, Alluvion designed several custom enhancements to further extend the standard VIM capabilities:

• Additional budget check in the approval logic:
• This check automatically triggers an extra (manager) approval level when invoices exceed a defined budget, reinforcing financial control.
• Approval based on cost center owners:
• Invoices are routed directly to the responsible cost center owners, aligning approval accountability with budget responsibility, instead of the pre-defined approvers from the Chart of Authority (COA) in a standard VIM solution.
• Strict segregation between Heylen Group and Heylen Warehouses:
• Validation- and AP-workflows, reports, and access rights were fully separated and restricted by authorizations, ensuring financial data integrity across all company codes.
• Scan-to-OCR automation:
• PDF invoices stored on the company's document management platform are automatically archived in SAP before being forwarded to IC4SAP where invoice data is automatically captured through OCR using AI, creating a fully digital workflow from receipt to posting. · Custom business rules to comply with company policy
• Check to ensure 3-way match blocks are resolved before PO invoices can be posted. This differs from the standard SAP logic where PO invoices can be posted with a payment block and are afterwards released for payment when 3-way match errors have been resolved.

The Results: operational efficiency through automation

The collaboration between Heylen Group and Alluvion resulted in a streamlined, transparent, and automated invoice process across more than 150 entities.

Key achievements include:

• Automated invoice registration and extraction
• Cost reduction by decreasing manual intervention throughout the entire flow
• Significantly faster processing from invoice receipt to posting
• Custom approval workflow integrated into VIM
• Improved accuracy by reducing data errors through OCR-based recognition, validation, and business rules
• Clear audit trails across all entities
• Stronger supplier relationships through faster and more consistent invoice handling, enhancing collaboration

By digitizing and automating invoice management across more than 150 company codes, Heylen Group gained full visibility and control over its invoice process. The AP teams at Heylen Group and Heylen Warehouses now work within a unified yet fully segregated environment, ensuring both efficiency and compliance with company policies.

Combining Alluvion’s technical expertise with Heylen’s commitment to digital transformation resulted in a scalable solution that enhances both operational efficiency and governance. Beyond automation, this implementation establishes the foundation for continuous improvement and growth by centralizing invoice management across the organization.

Future planned enhancements

The next steps for Heylen are to connect SAP DRC with SAP VIM, enabling full end-to-end integration of PEPPOL invoices within the existing VIM solution.