Lufthansa accelerates payment quality
- Industry: Transportation
- Revenue: $21.4 Billion
- Employees: 10,000+
- Headquarters: Frankfurt, Germany
Business need
Business need
Lufthansa Group is Germany’s flag carrier. With its subsidiaries, it’s the second largest airline in Europe for passengers carried and the fourth largest airline in the world by revenue.
Key facts:
- 540 entities worlwide
- 1500 bank accounts
- Multiple electronic banking systems used for payment approval and execution
Lufthansa’s payment challenges
The Group faced significant challenges with payments. Handling most of them via the electronic protocols of its various banks, the company was manually executing approvals and workflows across hundreds of accounts with over 100 banks in 107 different countries for each of its 540 group entities.
Given the different levels of functionality, diversity of formats and varying opportunities for process automation, this created fragmented processes for retrieving bank statements, approving and executing payments, and user administration. It also resulted in a similar patchwork of internal processes across multiple ERPs, SAP instances, and other diverse internal systems.
Solution implemented
Solution implemented
Lufthansa’s transformation approach
Lufthansa knew the smart solution was to standardize processes by creating a global “payment factory” for managing all inbound invoices. As part of this process, they would also streamline its banking infrastructure to focus on a few main partners for all cash management activities and simplify and rationalize documentation and record keeping at the same time.
They chose Serrala as their partner for this project because of our solutions’ flexibility, or expertise across financial automation (and dedicated project team structure for implementation), and our rule-based approach to automating the conversion of incoming file formats to ISO 20022 compliant XML files.
Results achieved
Results achieved
The result – automated, controlled, consistent processes
Lufthansa has been able to connect its affiliated companies and subsidiaries to its new payment factory and harmonize processes across over 75% of all outgoing vendor payments. As part of the process of achieving this goal, the company has also radically simplified its banking landscape – making the process of auditing bank fees and performance easier and allowing them to monitor and reconcile these fees at the account level in real time.
