One-stop shop AP for 15,000 suppliers & 1M invoices

Inside one of the largest DACH private hospital networks

Our client is one of Europe's leading private hospital operators, managing over 150 hospitals and medical facilities across Germany.

The group's accounts payable operation reflects that scale: a single, centralized finance function processing invoices for hundreds of facilities, each generating its own document flows, with more than 1 million invoices per year and over 15,000 suppliers to manage.

One platform for compounding value — from invoice automation to a full AP transformation

Auto-coding (pilot)

Prior to working with Hypatos, our client had already invested in AP automation. An external outsourcer handled PO invoice scanning and matching, and RPA technology supported parts of the workflow. For PO invoices, this had achieved roughly 54% automation — a result that reflected the practical ceiling for rules-based technology when applied to high-variance, real-world invoice data across hundreds of facilities.

High manual effort on non-PO documents

Non-PO invoices presented a separate and more fundamental problem. Without a purchase order to match against, cost centre assignment and approval routing required manual handling for every document. Across their hospitals and clinics, each receiving invoices from a wide range of suppliers, there was no viable rules-based path to automation. The non-PO automation rate stood at 0%.

Data protection and system complexity

The environment also carried data privacy requirements that went beyond standard enterprise AP. Invoices flowing through the system sometimes contained patient information, placing data handling under Germany's strictest healthcare privacy regulations.

Processing such data required formal certification, a prerequisite without which any automation vendor would simply not be permitted to operate. On top of this, our client runs two specialist hospital management systems, AMOR and KOST, that are specific to the healthcare sector and required dedicated integration work alongside SAP and xSuite.

Complex approval routing

The approval workflow of the healthcare provider added a further layer of complexity. Rather than assigning invoices to named approvers per vendor, the organization routes documents to approval pools where any available member picks up the next invoice, structured similarly to a call centre queue. Routing each invoice to the correct pool required content-based judgement, not simple rule matching.

A supplier-first rollout, built on healthcare-grade certification

Supplier-first approach

Rather than a company-code or regional rollout, the implementation was structured around suppliers. The team identified the highest-priority vendors according to volume and complexity across facilities and used these as the pilot foundation. This approach allowed the system to achieve broad coverage from the outset, processing most incoming invoice volume before the full supplier base was onboarded.

A C5-certified partnership

Before processing began, Hypatos obtained the required healthcare data security certification, a prerequisite for handling documents that may contain patient information. This certification represents one of the highest data privacy standards applicable to document processing, and is now a formal part of Hypatos's compliance credentials.

Intelligent non-PO processing

For non-PO invoices, the AI agents predict the correct cost centre for each document and determine which approval pool should handle it, based on invoice content. With different pools responsible for different spend categories across facilities, this routing logic requires the kind of contextual interpretation that rules-based systems are not able to provide.

Payment advice processing

A second distinct use case was also brought into scope. Germany's statutory health insurers operate by sending monthly payment advice documents to hospitals, sometimes 300 pages long, covering thousands of patient cases, confirming amounts already transferred.

Our client must reconcile these against internal records, a process that was previously handled entirely by hand. Hypatos now automates this reconciliation, and the use case is being extended across additional insurer relationships.

Phase rollout

Near-full automation across PO and non-PO, and third-party dependency removed

PO processing improved from 54% at go-live to 97%, a gain of 43 percentage points. Non-PO moved from 0% to 86%, converting what had been a fully manual process across their facilities into an automated workflow. The temporary dip in automation rates at the start of Wave 2, when the full supplier base was onboarded simultaneously, recovered steadily — reflecting the system's ability to adapt and stabilise as new data flows through.

Note: Some booking circles were automatically paused where Approver Pool routing could not be resolved; these are excluded from the automation rate calculation. The dip at Wave 2 kickoff reflects the simultaneous onboarding of the full supplier base.

Deeper compliance intelligence & expanding the insurer network

With both waves of the AP rollout complete and payment advice processing live, the focus has shifted to extending the capabilities of the solution already in place.

Roadmap