Linecross Ltd, based at its two state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities in the Midlands, is the UK’s largest independent vacuum forming company and a leading European manufacturer of polymer and polyurethane composites products. Supplying high quality, technical solutions as a Tier 1 to the automotive, off-highway and leisure markets.
Founded in 1967, Rutland-based Linecross is the UK’s largest independent vacuum-forming company, and one of Europe’s leading manufacturers of polymer and polyurethane composite products, serving a broad swathe of automotive customers. Bought by its management team in 2003, the business has expanded significantly in recent years, acquiring a Birmingham-based composites manufacturer in 2013.
Efficiency has always been important to Linecross, explains David Austin, the company’s Chairman and Finance Director. The company had implemented Exel Computer Systems’ EFACS E/8 ERP system in 2006, subsequently making extensive use of it right across the business and Austin credits EFACS E/8 with helping to power the company’s subsequent growth.
And yet, pockets of inefficiency remained – one such being invoice processing. Heavily reliant on paper-based manual processes, the business had the equivalent of two full-time personnel engaged on invoice processing. Austin estimates, dealing with the 900 or so invoices that Linecross receive each month.
“The case for automation was clearly compelling,” he sums up.
The problem? EFACS E/8 did not include an automated invoice processing module. And Linecross, and Austin, resolutely refused to look at third-party automated invoice processing systems.
“EFACS E/8 has been our core ERP system since 2006 – it is absolutely central to everything that we do,” he explains. “Introducing a third-party system would significantly compromise our over-arching IT strategy – we want a fully joined-up process, contained within a single system.”
So, when at an EFACS E/8 user group meeting in late 2023, Exel personnel revealed that Exel was in the early stages of development of an automated invoice processing system, Austin quickly engaged with the proposition, offering Linecross as a launch customer, and himself – being a Finance Director – as a source of guidance and advice in terms of user requirements and user experience.
Both offers were quickly accepted, and active development began. Almost a year later, in September 2024, development had reached the point where a beta version of the module could be installed on Linecross’ test server.
Shortly thereafter, Austin and Linecross hosted a day-long developer workshop at Linecross HQ, in order to outline feedback in the form of enhancements, improvements, required fixes and additional process checks that Linecross personnel had noted while testing the beta version.
“The point is that the real world is a lot messier than the nice, neat process flows outlined in the textbooks,” notes Austin. “Purchase Invoices might arrive before the goods – and therefore before a Goods Received Note had been created – or after the goods had been received. A month end might separate a Goods Received Note and the invoice. Real-world invoices vary spectacularly from invoice to invoice, too – from an optical character recognition perspective, the challenges are considerable.
And real-world financial policies vary enormously, too – ‘touchless’ postings to purchase ledgers and subsequent purchase invoice payment might be technically possible, but not every company wants to do that.”
The September 2024 meeting between Linecross and Exel ended with an unusual agreement. For its part, Linecross was determined to only go-live with a new automated invoice processing system at the start of a financial year. Linecross’ financial year began on February 1st each year – a little over four months away. And there was still development work left to do.
“We were emphatic about our requirement,” sums up Austin. “In a real-world environment, it was crucial that control checks were built into the systems, so as to ensure that the system was only processing invoices for which GRNs existed, that were without price or quantity discrepancies and that were applicable to the required accounting period.”
Could Exel deliver that by February 1st? No one knew. But it didn’t matter, says Austin.
“I told Exel to work hard, but that we’d take the module anyway, and go-live on February 1st regardless. It might be messy for a while, but the potential gains far outweighed the downsides.”
By go-live, on February 1st 2025, the system needed some manual workarounds and additional checks, but it was clear that the gains did indeed outweigh the downsides.
From requiring two full-time personnel to process invoices, the workload quickly dropped to less than one full-time person.
Invoice processing times sharply accelerated too. “Previously, with our entirely manual process, the shortest time that an invoice could be processed was probably a day, even with special expediting,” says Austin. “Now the system is fully implemented and working, it’s 60 seconds, or less.”
Process quality and accuracy have also improved. With a purely manual process, mistakes can happen – automation imposes rigour, notes Austin. He also pays tribute to Exel’s AI augmentation of the automated invoice processing system’s optical character recognition.
“Conventional OCR can ‘scrape’ documents for data, but isn’t smart – you often have to tell it what data is where, or manually augment the process. AI is smart enough to recognise purchase order numbers for what they are, and identify totals in a column, because all the other numbers add up to it.”
And, as part of an over-arching ERP system, he notes, the automated invoice processing system can carry out checks that might be cumbersome or time-consuming to undertake manually – for instance, checking that the invoiced price of goods matches the contractually agreed price.
In short, sums up Austin, Exel’s EFACS E/8 automated invoice processing module system has fully met Linecross’ aspirations in terms of productivity, efficiency and processing rigour.
“Best of all, it’s broken the link between the size of the business and the number of people involved in invoice processing. Now, as we grow, we don’t need to hire more people to process any increase in invoice volumes.”
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