Asian Paints automates employee reimbursement saving 490 hours per month using Nanonets

Asian Paints, one of Fortune 500, has been India’s largest and Asia's third-largest paint company for almost 50 years. It primarily deals in industrial coating, paints, varnishes, etc., has operations in 14 countries, and manufacturing facilities in 26 global locations. Headquartered in Mumbai, and boasting a revenue of $4.26 Bn., they have an impressive employee strength of over 8,000 and manage a vendor network of 22,000+.

       
1. Location: Mumbai, India
       
2. Founded: 1942
       
3. Leadership: KBS Anand (CEO), Amit Syngle (COO), Jayesh Merchant (CFO)
       
4. Industry: FMCG (Industrial and Household Coatings)
       
5. Employee Count: 1,001-10,000
       
6. Revenue: $ 4.26 Bn.
   

Summary: Given the scale of operations at Asian paints, manual data entry was a drain on resources. The challenge was primarily automating the internal reimbursement processes relating to employees.

Description:

Here is a deeper look into the exact process and its challenges at Asian Paints:

1. Asian Paints has an internal CRM where employees can pick the type of reimbursement receipt they are submitting (food bills, liquor bills, telephone bills, etc.).
2. Each receipt submitted has to be reviewed by a team member. The relevant data points such as, employee name, ID, and the total amount have to be manually extracted and sent for approval by their manager.
3. Upon approval, the receipt then goes to the accounts payable department and the employee gets reimbursed.
4. In case of any discrepancy, such as, maximum limit breach for reimbursement or absence of prior permissions, the revised reimbursement amount is shared with the employee and upon acceptance, the payout is made.

This process was tedious and time-consuming and led to delays in reimbursements, leading to a diminished employee experience.

Nanonets helped automate the entire employee reimbursement process end-to-end. Here is a quick look at the solution:

1. Automated Import: Nanonets directly imports the uploaded receipts from the internal CRM.
2. Redirection to custom OCR models: We then redirect the receipt to a custom OCR model based on receipt type. For instance, a food receipt is redirected to food receipt OCR model, a telephone receipt is redirected to a telephone receipt OCR model and so on.
3. Data extraction: All relevant data points are extracted, for example, in a telephone receipt, we extract the employee name, service provider, duration, total amount, etc.
4. Accounts team notifications: The extracted data then flows back into the Internal CRM where the AP team gets an option to make corrections.
5. Approval routing: If there are corrections made, it gets routed to the respective employee for approval. In case of no corrections, the receipt gets approved automatically.