Enterprise Workflow Automation: The Linde Group Streamlines Customer Invoicing with SAP-Kiteworks Integration
Enterprise workflow automation streamlines processes, improves efficiencies, and helps organizations deliver the best possible service to customers. The Linde Group is using the Kiteworks secure file sharing and governance platform for enterprise workflow automation, increasing throughput of delivery documents by roughly 50%.
Here’s a summary of how The Linde Group is able to streamline customer invoicing and accelerate revenue recognition while maintaining compliance with HIPAA.
Enterprise Workflow Automation with HIPAA Compliance for the Healthcare Industry
The Linde Group is a leading global supplier of industrial, process and specialty gases and is one of the world’s most profitable engineering companies. Linde products and services can be found in nearly every industry, in more than 100 countries. With approximately 60,000 employees worldwide, the company is committed to technologies and products that unite the goals of customer value and sustainable development.
The Linde Group’s pharmaceutical and medical gas products and services enable healthcare professionals to provide optimal therapies and treatments for a number of medical conditions. For every delivery of industrial and specialty gases made to a healthcare provider, Linde generates an associated Proof of Delivery (POD) document. It’s not uncommon for Linde to make over 1,000 deliveries to some customers in one month, resulting in the same number of POD documents.
In order for Linde to get paid for these products, Linde’s healthcare customers and their insurance payers need to be able to match a POD to an invoice.
“Some of our customers receive 400 deliveries a week that all roll up to one insurance payer,” said Bob Gentile, Business Process Specialist with The Linde Group. “There was a huge amount of manpower needed on our customers’ behalf to manage the billing and invoicing of our products and we wanted to make the process much less resource intensive.”
As a first attempt at applying enterprise workflow automation to this challenge, Linde tried using a third-party service provider to scan and index delivery numbers and then print and mail POD documents to customers, but the process wasn’t ideal.
Next, Linde decided to leverage its internal SAP deployment to streamline the POD and invoicing process, driven by customized business rules. Taking full control of its enterprise workflow automation, the organization brought the POD process back in-house and began using an electronic capture and recognition technology to scan PODs and convert them to PDFs.
Essentially, once a POD image is automatically linked to a delivery record in SAP, custom code downloads the proof of delivery and associated invoice images from SAP for set periods of time and stitches both together into a multiple-page PDF document.
With this new process, Linde was able to provide 99% or more of its PODs to customers, up from less than 70% – a roughly 50% improvement in output.
Linde then faced a new challenge: how to get the PDFs into the hands of customers? Not only were the documents massive in size—a single document might contain a thousand or more pages and therefore far too large for many email systems—but they also contained confidential customer and financial information. As a result, Linde also needed an enterprise workflow automation solution that was compliant with HIPAA.
The Linde Group turned to Kiteworks to enable their POD documents to be delivered to customers on demand, quickly and securely. Kiteworks private cloud secure file sharing platform enables business users and application to share files securely while supporting HIPAA compliance as well as compliance with other applicable regulations.
The Linde Group’s custom code places the POD documents and invoices into custom folders – one for each customer – using SAP’s “ship to” data. Leveraging the Kiteworks desktop synchronization client, Linde is then able to automatically synchronize the folders’ content on the Kiteworks platform, mirroring the folder hierarchy Gentile has set up on an internal Linde server. Through this synchronization, Kiteworks ensures that the latest delivery and billing documentation is ready for downloading by Linde Group’s customers.
“Now, our customers have access to the time-sensitive Proof of Delivery document they need and turnaround, on our end, is basically one day,” said Gentile. “Adding Kiteworks to our extensive customer billing process has accelerated our revenue recognition cycle and positively impacted our organization’s bottom line.”
Learn More
To learn more about the Linde Group and its integration of Kiteworks and SAP for enterprise workflow automation, schedule a custom demo of Kiteworks today.
Frequently Asked Questions
HIPAA compliance is the adherence to the federal standards set forth in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. This includes requirements on the handling and protection of patient data, as well as patient privacy.
Protected health information (PHI) is any individually identifiable information related to a patient’s physical or mental health condition, the provision of healthcare, or payment for healthcare services. This includes names, addresses, Social Security numbers, medical records, and any other confidential information associated with a patient’s health.
Failure to adhere to HIPAA compliance regulations can result in civil or criminal penalties. Civil penalties range from $100 to $50,000 per incident. In cases of willful neglect, criminal penalties can lead to up to 10 years of imprisonment.
To meet HIPAA compliance requirements, your technology must offer secure data storage, access control, user authentication, encryption, audit logging, and activity monitoring. It should also offer the ability to restrict access to data based on the user’s role and authorize individuals to have access only to the data they need.
Adhering to HIPAA compliance regulations can help protect patient data, increase trust in the healthcare system, reduce healthcare costs, and improve patient safety. It can also protect your organization from legal and financial repercussions.
To ensure your organization is HIPAA compliant, you should work with a qualified third-party vendor that can help you audit your data and processes, develop a comprehensive information security plan, and train your staff on best practices for data security and patient privacy.
Kiteworks provides organizations with the tools and features necessary to ensure their data is secure and private and remains compliant with HIPAA. The Kiteworks Private Content Network enables organizations to demonstrate compliance with HIPAA by unifying, controlling, tracking, and securing sensitive PHI data exchanges—email, file sharing, managed file transfer, web forms, and APIs. Kiteworks offers role-based access control to ensure users are only granted access to the data they need to perform their job, and helps organizations monitor and control data access in accordance with HIPAA. It also keeps organizations in compliance with HIPAA through its automated audit logging capabilities, as well as providing on-demand data destruction capabilities and comprehensive reporting capabilities. These features help organizations maintain a clear view of their data security posture and ensure that patient data is only being accessed by authorized individuals and is securely and permanently deleted when no longer needed.
Additional Resources
- Blog Post What is an Enterprise File Server?
- Blog Post What is an ECM Document Management System?
- Glossary What is Integrated Risk Management TX?
- Blog Post How to Send GDPR Compliant Email
- Glossary How to Find the Best Managed File Transfer Software