Basware leverages AI to simplify coding of proprietary ETL language and boost efficiency on AWS
This global AP automation company is experimenting with using generative AI to transform its invoicing platform and optimize their onboarding process.
Industry
Financial Services
Challenge
Streamline the onboarding process for 800+ customers learning a proprietary ETL language.
Solutions Foundry for AI by Rackspace (FAIR™) Platforms Amazon Web Services (AWS)"Rackspace Technology is absolutely fundamental to our success. You don't work with a partner like Rackspace Technology for a long time, like we do, unless you're getting a lot from it, which we definitely are."
Our customer
Founded in 1985, Basware is a leading provider of network accounts payable (AP) automation solutions, offering a comprehensive suite of tools and expertise to streamline invoice processing for businesses worldwide. With a vision to bring true automation to the CFO office, the Finland-based company's AP automation and e-invoice open network platform helps customers achieve new levels of efficiency, while reducing risk.
Processing over 220 million electronic invoices annually for major companies, like DHL, Clarins and Mercedes-Benz, Basware is trusted by top organizations globally to help them operate their AP departments more effectively, so they can contribute to their companies' success. With a focus on efficiency and accuracy, Basware helps companies of all sizes optimize their AP workflow, reducing manual tasks and improving financial visibility.
The obstacles they faced
Basware is a fast-growing company and planning to grow rapidly in the coming years. To enable sustainable growth, Basware was looking to optimize its customer onboarding process using generative AI. Part of this investigation focuses on a proprietary XML-based ETL language Basware uses to exchange data and financial documents between systems and extend the AP automation workflows and automation.
The AI solution enables the company to efficiently deliver and consistently apply its extensive expertise, raising overall value. Reduced configuration efforts and increased accuracy help to streamline onboarding and lower barriers for the expertise required, enhancing overall operational efficiency.
"We were trying to understand the technology better, to determine how we could leverage it in the context of enabling our partners," said Alistair Gilbert, VP, Platform Engineering at Basware.
He emphasized Basware's culture of innovation and its 40 years of experience in AP automation best practices. "We have a fantastic culture, hugely competent, with capable people who are engaged and excited about achieving success for our customers," Gilbert added.
"The Rackspace Technology team’s approach was fantastic. They have people who deeply know what they're talking about when it comes to AI and generative AI."
How we helped
Basware partnered with Rackspace Technology® to learn how far generative AI could optimize its AP automation expertise. The Foundry for AI by Rackspace (FAIR™) provided the expertise, standardized delivery practices, partnerships and diverse skill set to help accelerate the secure, responsible and sustainable adoption of generative AI, providing the enhanced ability for Basware customers to leverage the company’s best-in-class AP automation.
Through FAIR™, Rackspace Technology brought together all the resources needed to help Basware create, innovate and streamline code generation to improve its overall efficiency.
“We had worked with Rackspace Technology previously and we knew they could help us scope the project and show us how to work with generative AI,” said Hanna Leino, Director of Product Management at Basware. “We knew this project was going to be something completely new for us and we wanted a partner who we already knew and trusted.”
The goal of the FAIR team was to train an AI language model to autonomously generate the essential XML integration code, enabling Basware's consultants to create code snippets that are optimized for AP automation workflows by simply asking questions in natural language.
Gilbert explains that its ERP GPT project aimed to explore how generative AI could enable Basware's partners to configure their services more inline with best practice AP automation.
"We have a proprietary language, called AnyERP,” explained Anssi Ruokonen, Head of AI Research and Enablement at Basware. “We fine-tuned a large language model to understand the language and help generate it for our consultants.”
To teach the AI model to understand and generate Basware's complex proprietary XML syntax, the FAIR team experimented with various training processes, including few-shot learning (enabling AI models to learn from limited examples), fine-tuning and pre-training.
The team used Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that provided flexibility and access to different foundational models from leading AI companies, allowing the team to experiment with different approaches throughout the process.
By gradually feeding the model more data, the team increased its accuracy from 60% to an impressive 90% across different functions. The team is confident that with further fine tuning the accuracy can be improved.
What we achieved together
The FAIR project with Basware successfully demonstrated the viability of generative AI to encapsulate Basware’s AP automation expertise. By training a model to understand Basware's proprietary XML, the team developed code validation techniques and created a framework potentially enabling the company to deliver expertise at scale to all its customers.
This XML validation and code generation pilot not only illuminates a path for Basware to deliver enhanced value to all customers, but highlights the potential for generative AI to help address complex, industry-specific challenges.
While primarily a research initiative, this project demonstrates how Basware could, with further development, leverage generative AI to deliver its best-practice AP automation expertise to customers more rapidly in the future.
"Finding more innovative and advanced ways to support our partners enables us to achieve that scale," Gilbert said. "That's why this was such an important use case for us.
"The vision for this project was to understand if we could leverage generative AI to scale more efficiently and effectively through our implementation partner network," added Gilbert. "This project combined cutting-edge technology, like generative AI and AWS's newly released Bedrock capabilities, with an aspirational use case."
By empowering consultants with AI-powered accounts payable expertise to onboard customers without requiring technical expertise, Basware can grow its customer base through its partner network.
By leveraging FAIR, Basware successfully demonstrated the potential of generative AI to encapsulate and scale its 40 years of AP automation expertise, paving the way for more efficient delivery of best-practice solutions to customers.
"The future between our companies is bright,” said Leino. “We have a long history together and we both companies are advancing at a rapid pace. It’s a perfect match."
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