Customer Story: Renta Group Oy

Renta Group Oy is a young player in the Finnish construction machinery and equipment leasing field. The company was formed 2016 by the merger of three well-known companies, Telinekymppi Oy, Kehä-Kone Oy and Jasoca Oy. Renta Group's business has been growing strongly from the beginning. This year, the company will have a turnover of more than 200 million and more than 750 employees in four different countries. The goals of the company are high, which is also reflected in the high quality of the development of financial administration.

Renta Group Oy started to utilize artificial intelligence in the purchase invoice handling process as Snowfox.AI's first customer

Renta stands out from the crowd. Where in many other areas a leap into digitalisation has been made days ago, change has been slow in the machine rental industry. Renta, on the other hand, has been approaching digitalisation from the beginning with open arms, at the forefront and even ahead of schedule. Renta is a leading player in its field in terms of digitalisation. One proof of this is Renta's decision to implement Snowfox.AI service as the Snowfox.AI's first customer in 2018. The ability to test the AI service in a situation where others had not yet done so showed a pioneering attitude.

“Initially, the value produced by artificial intelligence was negligible. However, it didn’t bother us as we knew we were the first customer and Snowfox.AI took our feedback seriously ”, Joel Särkkä, CIO of Rentan Group Oy, recalls the early days of using the service and continues "After the initial difficulties, today we are extremely satisfied with the development work done and the added value that the service brings to us".

Belief in the capacity of artificial intelligence in handling purchase invoices was worthwhile

Renta is growing strongly. One major reason for the implementation of AI was the decision to build a company where all services and systems are scalable and support future growth. The ideology of Snowfox.AI was in line with this. The number of incoming purchase invoices was already high two years ago, and with growth it will be even higher. In 2020, the number of the company's purchase invoices jumped to 37,000. The problem that arose with the workload of handling purchase invoices burdened both the account payable and the business.

The Snowfox.AI service was seen as a potential solution to reduce the manual workload of the purchase invoices and to routine tasks at Renta. It was understood that artificial intelligence could support the process of  handling purchase invoices, especially when volumes are large and there is a lot of variation. Belief in artificial intelligence capacity and the Snowfox.AI concept was worthwhile. Currently, Snowfox.AI automates 27,400 of Renta’s purchase invoices that would otherwise be processed manually. The predicting accuracies of artificial intelligence for Renta's purchase invoices have developed dramatically over the past two years. Today, artificial intelligence predicts for three of the five dimensions with an accuracy of 80 to 100 percent, and for two dimensions with an accuracy of 77 to 78 percent. The relief for employees in the purchase ledger and business is considerable.

“With Snowfox.AI, we have also been able to get formality into incoming invoices and improve the quality of accounting when invoices have been pre-posted by artificial intelligence. The better we are able to do accounting, the less it causes the handling of deviations in financial administration” Joel Särkkä describes the benefits brought by the service.

Not an apparent hype trend, but a real delivery of a value proposition

Joel Särkkä describes the collaboration with Snowfox.AI being easy. Even after the twists and turns in the beginning, confidence in Snowfox.AI's operations has been maintained. Often, artificial intelligence may involve empty promises or the technology is seen as self-serving. In the case of Snowfox.AI, Renta has appreciated the real value it brings to the real existing problem: “Snowfox.AI is a good example of a Finnish innovative company that has productized an artificial intelligence service for a problem that is very universal and affects many companies,” Joel Särkkä comments and continues “We are pleased to be involved in this story. It 's always great to have stories like this come up here in the cold North!".