Bodmer AG, a manufacturer of wooden crates and pallets based in Niedergösgen, receives around 70 supplier invoices per week. A single employee enters and codes every invoice manually in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, after which the documents are filed physically. The effort amounts to roughly half a working day per week. In addition, AX 2009 has been out of support since April 2022 and is likely to be replaced in the medium term. The company therefore sought a solution that reduces data-entry effort without becoming tightly bound to the existing ERP system.

The current process was documented through observation and a structured interview, from which a requirements catalogue was derived. The market analysis produced a longlist, reduced to four candidates by applying knock-out criteria. These were examined through vendor documentation, product demonstrations, a reference visit to an existing user and direct enquiries to providers, and then assessed using a weighted scoring model. A sensitivity analysis subsequently tested how stable the outcome remains under different weightings.

Three of the four candidates were ruled out, not because of missing functionality, but because the investment and implementation effort were disproportionate to the scale of the process. In one case the implementation partner advised against the solution, having no project experience with the ERP system in use. This shifted the underlying question: not which platform performs best, but which part of the process actually requires specialised software.The time consuming element is data capture. Account coding, by contrast, follows a fixed rule for recurring suppliers and can be handled through a mapping table. The thesis therefore recommends combining a Swiss OCR service with an Excel-based coding table and a subsequent data import into the ERP system. The solution can be put into operation within days, incurs low running costs and remains usable after a future ERP migration; it is deliberately designed as a transitional solution.One technical precondition must be clarified before implementation: whether the existing ERP system supports the required data import.