Finland’s leading property and facility services company, ISS Palvelut Oy, collaborated with Solita to develop a generative AI tool to streamline its billing process. The AI tool assists in finalising work descriptions for outgoing invoices, significantly reducing the time spent on the billing process.
Saves billing staff’s time: The tool processes and edits the work descriptions for outgoing invoices, assisting the billing team.
AI doesn’t replace billing team’s expertise but frees up time for tasks that require specialised billing skills. This way, we improve efficiency while making work more meaningful.
Ville Takkinen Head of Order to Cash, ISS Palvelut
ISS is Finland’s leading facility management company and part of the global ISS Group. It provides a comprehensive range of services to its customers, including property maintenance, cleaning, catering, and workplace services.
During the past two years, Solita has developed a custom billing system for ISS Palvelut to manage additional work billing of property maintenance. The tailored system is still undergoing further development, aiming to make the billing process even smoother.
In 2023, approximately 120,000 invoices were issued for additional property maintenance work. These invoices range in value from €10 to hundreds of thousands of euros, typically covering a single task per invoice. This results in thousands of invoices being sent to customers every month.
Work descriptions detailing the work completed are generated based on comments entered into the system. However, they sometimes contain typos or unnecessary information from the customer’s perspective. Over half of these invoices require minor edits, which consume a significant amount of the billing staff’s time.
To reduce the time spent on billing, ISS decided to pilot the use of AI for finalising work descriptions. Since the property maintenance services’ ERP and billing system were developed by Solita, it was a natural choice to collaborate on a proof-of-concept project.
Within three months, Solita and ISS developed a tool integrated into the billing system.
The tool effectively and accurately refined work descriptions: 72% of cases required no further manual edits, saving significantly time of the billing team.
“The tool was developed in collaboration with ISS’s experts and Solita’s multi-disciplinary team. The team combined expertise in language modelling and AI solutions, and their productisation, with software design and software development expertise,” says Kaisa Rolig, Account Director at Solita.
Every year, tens of thousands of work descriptions were handled manually. The generative AI tool, developed in summer 2024, has already reduced the amount of manual work required for the descriptions. This has sped up the invoice processing time, increased customer satisfaction.
“Billing staff perform valuable and essential work. This solution is designed to make their daily tasks easier. AI doesn’t replace their expertise but frees up time for tasks that require specialised billing skills. This way, we improve efficiency while making work more meaningful,” states Ville Takkinen, Head of Order to Cash, ISS Palvelut.
Statistical data on the use of the AI tool is continuously collected and will be used to further develop the tool.
The generative AI tool integrated into the property maintenance services’ billing system is just the beginning: the aim is to automate systems even further.
In the future, learning AI solutions can be leveraged for additional use cases, freeing up time for more meaningful tasks.
Kaisa Rolig Account Director, Solita
