USE CASE DEEP DIVE
How automation can help you process orders faster and more accurate
Reduce time spend on processing orders
Reduce order processing cost
Minimize errors in order processing
Processing incoming orders. The nightmare of every backoffice team in companies. Depending on the complexity of the company and products, processing these incoming orders usually takes up a lot of valuable manual time and is error-prone.
In this page, we want to show you the benefits from automating this process.
What you'll learn:
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The challenge with processing incoming orders
Your organization probably receives incoming orders in the mailboxes every day. Usually pdfs.
The content on these documents is of course crucial for further processing and organizations are staffing backoffice teams or sales reps to do so. The process usually looks like this: open email, open ERP, create new order, select client, select products, select delivery address, … A manual, repetitive, error-prone process. (and nobody likes it)
Challenge 1: knowledge and training of order processing teams
When talking to organizations, this is a first challenge that always pops up. It takes a lot of time to train their backoffice teams to know the product range and possibilities (especially in manufacturing companies). In some companies, it can take up to 2 years to get a fully trained backoffice employee that is able to process all these incoming orders independently.
On top of that, the war on talent doesn’t make it easy for organizations to streamline order processing workflows. The mix of long onboarding and the challenge of not finding people is one of the biggest struggles our clients are facing.
Challenge 2: manual order processing is slow, error-prone and boring
As said, a lot of organizations are staffing backoffice sales teams or customer service employees to process these orders manually. Manual processing takes up a lot of time and is slow. Some of our clients used to spend more than 30 minutes on processing 1 order.
The nature of this manual data-entry work also makes it error-prone. It’s boring, you easily lose concentration, and typing over information and numbers easily has errors in it: wrong product number, quantity, shipping address, billing information, …
Errors in order processing always have a cost: unsatisfied customer, delayed orders, cost of replacing order, … We’re sure these are situations you want to avoid.
Challenge 3: automating orders was not an option (until now)
When it comes to optimizing cost components in organizations, labor cost is the biggest impact driver. Beyond measuring the direct labor cost, let’s also think about the opportunity cost incurred of having staff performing repetitive transaction-oriented chores when they could be spending in more valuable ways.
So automating this process should be a no-brainer, right? So why is it that so few companies are doing so?
Finding good people is a hassle for everyone in our industry. We have a complex product range and it usually takes up to 1,5 years for an new employee to be ramped up.
Together with Jorosoft, they decided to build a product configurator to make the job easier for them. But still… another challenge popped up.
Challenge 2: processing orders was time-intensive and error-prone
While it becomes easier for their salespeople to get to know the product range and build custom-made solutions, the processing of standard orders (which is also a big part of their work) takes a lot of time. On top of that, the process was error-prone. The entire management team was convinced that time spent on manually processing orders is time lost. This means that their salespeople are not able to use this time to help clients. It was a no-brainer to start automating this work and so the quest for a solution began…
Our backoffice team was processing all these orders manually. We believed this is not valuable work and we wanted to free them from that work so they could focus on interactions with clients and improving customer experience.
Don’t take our word for it. In the video below, CEO Bart Nivelles and Business Controller Jan Van den Bulck describe the challenge they were facing.
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The solution
Group Nivelles is not new in the automation landscape. Since a couple of years, the company is already processing invoices with OCR. OCR works well for pre-defined templates, like invoices, but with tons of variations in documents and products, OCR would not be able to automate this. They needed an intelligent solution. And that’s where IDP comes in.
Together with Metamaze and partner Jorosoft, we began exploring how we could help them automate these orders.
So how does it work?
- Incoming orders in mailbox are forwarded into Metamaze
Our partner Jorosoft created an integration through API with Metamaze so incoming orders are automatically imported into Metamaze - Information extraction in Metamaze
From there on, the data extraction part in Metamaze starts. Our AI models are trained to extract information like client, delivery address, product, … - Through another API the extracted information is automatically inserted into a new order in the ERP system of Group Nivelles
- The back office team verifies the order.
Discover how our collaboration started and what the steps are between discovery and “go live” in the video below.
The result
ROI
Group Nivelles is already processing 90% of orders automatically. This results in:
- 📉 Monthly order processing time reduced by 70 hours
- 💰 Processing cost reduced with 64%
Better employee and customer experience
The backoffice team of Group Nivelles that used to do repetitive data-entry work, now have a new exciting job. There is more room for customer interactions since up to 4 minutes per order is saved. On top of that, they now have become AI operators and invest only a small amount of time every week to keep on training the AI models so the automation rate even improves over time.
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The collaboration
While it was a no-brainer to invest in a solution to automate these incoming orders, choosing a technology vendor is not something you do overnight. So why did Group Nivelles decided to work together with Metamaze?
Efficiency gains and short payback period
After an extensive potential ROI analysis, the financial department discovered that our platform has a very interesting payback period and has a lot of potential in terms of efficiency gains, which is also visible in the early results of the collaboration.
User-friendly platform
After a demo, Group Nivelles was convinced that our platform is one of the most user-friendly IDP platforms out there. Being able to maintain the platform themselves without having to pay consultants was a major benefit.
Scalability
The third reason was that Metamaze is not a niche platform and can be scaled across other processes and documents in the future.
In the video below, Business Controller Jan Van den Bulck is describing why they decided to choose for Metamaze.
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Metamaze is a no-code Intelligent Document Processing platform that uses AI to automate every document and email workflow.