Sansan, Inc.: Innovating invoice management with machine learning and Google Cloud's fully managed services
About Sansan
Sansan, Inc. helps companies digitally transform sales. It first released its namesake, Sansan solution, which combines a corporate database and a company's own contact database to let users uncover hidden business opportunities. Sansan, Inc. then expanded its product portfolio to include the Eight contact and career management app, and more recently, a cloud-based invoice receiving and management solution, Bill One.
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Contact usAs part of its growth strategy and mission of "Turning encounters into innovation," Sansan, Inc. successfully built and launched an enterprise product that helps companies accurately digitize all their invoices.
Google Cloud results
- Removes need for dedicated resource for infrastructure management
- Enables a fully managed cloud service scalable with a lean internal team
- Achieves 99.9% accuracy with digitized invoices
Sansan, Inc. successfully built out a fully managed and scalable DevOps infrastructure
Sansan, Inc. offers business infrastructure SaaS solutions and has particular strengths in identifying new markets and products. It helps companies transform the way they do business, using cloud-based professional services. The company has steadily grown and diversified its product portfolio, starting with the namesake Sansan B2B contact management platform in 2007, then the contact and career management app Eight in 2012. In 2020, Sansan launched Bill One, which helps enterprise users digitize and centralize invoice management.
Building for success with agility and flexibility in mind
While Sansan was familiar with multiple cloud services for product development, the company decided to adopt Google Cloud's fully managed service for agility and flexibility. "We are pushing the multi-cloud strategy from the start. The success of new businesses is key to the growth of the company, and the success of new businesses requires a platform that can support fast developments and a flexible organizational structure. So we decided to adopt Google Cloud for the development of Bill One," shares Shigemoto Fujikura, Executive Officer, CTO.
Besides multi-cloud architecture, there are two other main reasons why Google Cloud was adopted as the development and operation platform of Bill One. One is to reduce operational loads to concentrate on development, and the other is to further challenge advanced technologies.
"Fully managed Cloud Run does not require infrastructure management or a fully dedicated operations engineer. Since it can be operated by the engineer in charge of application development, the operational load can be reduced so the focus shifts to the development of functions. There are many great products for web development, such as BigQuery and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)," says Kota Kato, Bill One Engineering Unit, Technology Headquarters.
"As the business expands, performance concerns may arise, but Google Cloud is easy to scale, and reliable. We also get peace of mind thanks to the stability of the platform, and the help we receive from the Google Cloud team," Kato adds.
How it works: Bill One stores invoice PDF files in Cloud Storage. The operation is streamlined with the adoption of Error Reporting, which sends notifications when an error occurs in the production environment. Cloud Logging is used to manage multiple services across the board, while Cloud Armor serves as a WAF (Web Application Firewall) and API gateway for API management.
Achieving high accuracy with Vision AI
"We are pushing the multi-cloud strategy from the start. The success of new businesses is key to the growth of the company, and the success of new businesses requires a platform that can support fast developments and a flexible organizational structure. So we decided to adopt Google Cloud for the development of Bill One."
—Shigemoto Fujikura, Executive Officer, CTOBill One achieves a high scanning accuracy rate of 99.9% for its digitized invoice data. It does this simply by applying the same technology and operations cultivated through digitization of business cards. Previously, optical character recognition (OCR) worked in an App Engine flexible environment, but the team moved it to Cloud Run to speed things up. In addition, by utilizing other products such as Cloud Logging, Cloud Trace, Cloud Monitoring, and Error Reporting, Sansan managed to devise new ways to allow researchers who are not specialized in system development to also contribute in developing Bill One, thereby adding value.
"I've tried other OCR features, but Vision AI is superior in terms of accuracy and usability. It's easy to use and easy to develop applications, without complicated settings. Being able to operate the infrastructure with just basic knowledge also makes it very convenient," says Takahiro Shima, Arc Group, Research and Development Department, Technology Headquarters.
Another advantage of adopting Vision API is that the graphical user interface (GUI) is easy to understand and intuitive. For example, with Cloud Run, the team can see the type of error occurring, the container and memory status, and more, at a glance.
"Heavy image processing takes a long time to execute, but by using Cloud Trace, researchers can easily identify which processing is taking a long time. You can pinpoint and improve the algorithm," says Koki Nishihara, Arc Group, Research and Development Department, Technology Headquarters.
"I've tried other OCR features, but Vision API is superior in terms of accuracy and usability. It's easy to use and easy to develop applications, without complicated settings. Being able to operate the infrastructure with just basic knowledge also makes it very convenient."
—Takahiro Shima, Arc Group, Research and Development Department, Technology HeadquartersIdentifying new opportunities with data analytics
Bill One helps hundreds of companies streamline their invoicing process in order to speed up project completion and payment. Finance teams can simply upload their invoices to Bill One, regardless of the format, be it paper-based, PDF, or image. Bill One helps digitize the invoices, which can then be received and centrally managed in a secure, dedicated database. Since Bill One’s launch, Sansan has seen a tenfold increase in its recurring monthly revenue compared with the same period in November 2021.
Next, Sansan plans to use Google Cloud products such as BigQuery to help build data internal analysis platforms. These platforms will be used for better product management, team management and corporate governance. Each platform will be built for different purposes and targets, with its own data store and data lake respectively. Fujikura shares that Sansan has high hopes for BigQuery and other Google Cloud products to help realize these goals.
"We highly value how Google Cloud handles big data, so we are excited about the significant role it will play in building data analytics platforms for various corporate uses. We are also excited to work with the Premium Support team, sales and customer engineers again, as they have always provided invaluable help," concludes Fujikura.
"Fully managed Cloud Run does not require infrastructure management or a fully dedicated operations engineer. Since it can be operated by the engineer in charge of application development, the operational load can be reduced so the focus shifts to the development of functions. There are many great products for web development, such as BigQuery and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)."
—Kota Kato, Bill One Engineering Unit, Technology HeadquartersTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Sansan
Sansan, Inc. helps companies digitally transform sales. It first released its namesake, Sansan solution, which combines a corporate database and a company's own contact database to let users uncover hidden business opportunities. Sansan, Inc. then expanded its product portfolio to include the Eight contact and career management app, and more recently, a cloud-based invoice receiving and management solution, Bill One.