Centenary Football
Club Streamlines
Processes with DocDigitizer

Founded in the early 1900’s, this Club is one of the “Big Three" clubs in Portugal that have never been relegated from Primeira Liga. With close to 100 major trophies won and hundreds of championship trophies in different sports both international and domestic,
this Club is in the top 10 clubs of the Top 200 European clubs of the 20th century with multiple records on the number of trophies conquered.

Participating in over 30 sports, this Club has a representative number of athletes both professional and amateur, as well as schools and advanced training facilities.

The club is considered more of an institution working with people of all ages in multiple activities. In Portugal this Club has a relevant social presence with Sports Schools and training and health solutions ranging from insurance companies to hospitals.

This Club has received multiple awards from the City and Portuguese President.

With hundredths of thousands of associates and multiple professional international teams the number of documents was overwhelming. All the incoming documents were organized at the secretariat and forwarded to the respective departments. The financial department being the one who got the most of it.
The documents were forwarded to the respective level of hierarchy for manual validation and approval required according to the document’s value and internal regulations. Some of them went all the way up to the Club’s President.

In 2010, it was decided that all the documents were to be added to an internal digital workflow that caried the documents for approval according to the internal proceedings.

Each document was scanned and processed manually.

By 2018 the document volume had risen from 10.000 documents to 30.000. All of which had to be scanned, approved and paid.

The whole process was template based, some of the data fields weren’t properly extracted and more information was needed to fit new work processes. The present situation wasn’t capable to process multiple information sources without a long and exhausting template tuning process.

The increase in volume had created a problem for automation and information security.

When consulting the market for a versatile and agile solution that could handle the diversity of suppliers and documents the IT Team was confronted with heavy implementation projects with 12 to 16 weeks of deployment. Something that was not proportional to the predicted financial impact.

The effort and investment required for the on premises and template-based solutions were so complex and time consuming that rendered the project impossible to implement. The lack of agility to accept new fields, new documents and the error average presented themselves as a real barrier.

When DocDigitizer was tested, it was ready to go live in less than a month. It took a bit longer due to thorough security tests.

The solution had to be tested beyond any security doubt before implementation.

Along with security, speed and accuracy were repeatedly tested with different documents and layouts to ensure extraction precision.
As DocDigitizer’s AI learned and improved, new ad-hoc documents were tested for it to accept all kind of expense receipts such as parking, meal, and other small value unformatted documents.

After passing the security and performance checks, the benchmarks and ease of implementations ware paramount in choosing DocDigitizer.

With DocDigitizer working in full integration with the Club’s information system there is no more backlog caused by an overflow of documents or someone’s holidays.

More than 160h a month ware saved from administrative tasks that could be allocated to more productive activities. The driver never was to save manhours, but to strive for zero error and better data quality.

The confidence on the platform’s results are up to the point where it runs autonomously, and to achieve a more detailed analytical accounting, the possibility to match each document to its Purchase Order, weather it is referred to on the document or not, it is of great importance.

Even though DocDigitizer can work in near real time, for procedural reasons it was configured for two baches a day with 8 hours response time. This way it works Intune with the internal management system.