The Belgian design brand Serax stands for modern household goods and is globally positioned. In cooperation with leading international designers and artisans, Serax creates dishes, furniture, lights and other home accessories. The company designs its products in Europe and produces them worldwide.
Serax attaches great importance to customer orientation and offers both its B2B and B2C customers a first-class service. Exactly this customer orientation has prompted Serax SAP business AI solutions To introduce your order processing process.
The challenge
For most customers, including end customers (B2C), the ordering process is easy. You select the desired products in the web shop and the order is recorded directly in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.
The business customers (B2B), on the other hand, continue to give orders by generating a PDF file in their ERP system, which is then automatically sent to the mailbox of the Serax customer service. These manual B2B orders make up 30 percent of all orders that enter into Serax.
Since Serax attaches great importance to very good customer service, customer service is happy to process these orders. Nevertheless, these orders are a burden for the team. If such an order is entered, the customer service team must download the PDF manually, check appointments and quantities and then enter the order details in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition in order to apply the customer order. This process is very time -consuming and prone to errors.
“Excellent service is one of our most important priorities. We can achieve this through efficiency increases in certain processes,” explains Sara Goris, SAP product manager at Serax. “This is how we came up with this application. Our customer service team always had to manually enter 30 percent of all orders into the system. We wanted to optimize this process from our side, because many of our customers would otherwise continue to send orders in PDF format.”
The solution
Serax needed a solution to automatically create customer orders from PDF files. This was made possible with the app Create customer orders – automatic extraction. It just had to be activated and optimized. The app was created with Quote-to-cash solutions from SAP and with Sap fiorithe app platform that enables companies to map and optimize their business processes.
With the help of this app, Serax is possible to transfer a PDF file directly into the application from a customer email using drag-and-drop. The app then coordinates the entire process. In the first step, the PDF is sent to the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). There the data about the service Document Information Extraction extracted. The document API uses trained AI to read the data in the PDF files and output structured data. The second step is the data comparison. The application assigns the extracted data to the master data. This includes the client, recipient of goods and product. This ensures that the extracted data from the PDFS make sense in the context of the Serax business.
Then a requirement for a customer order is created, and a member of the service team is notified to check it and convert them into an actual customer order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.
Results
With the new application, the number of manual B2B orders has dropped by 33 percent.
And thanks to the time saving, Serax can now invest more time in better customer service. “Saving time means that our customer service employees can spend more time for real customer service instead of entering orders,” emphasizes Ragna Qvick, Digital Business Manager and HR Performance Manager at Serax. Serax employees now have more time for tasks with high added value, such as up or cross-selling.
This increase in efficiency means more capacity in the team and enables Serax to further expand the business. “We would have either needed more resources or our employees would have had to work more efficiently in order to be able to concentrate on the tasks that bring significant added value to our customers,” adds Goris.
Another advantage of automation is fewer errors, since employees in customer service no longer have to manually enter exact values from the PDF file when creating customer orders. Instead, you can use the document extraction to fill out the order. You just have to confirm the values. “This is how the error risk is reduced, because where people work there is always a risk that mistakes will be made, for example in the case of quantities or other details,” says Qvick.
Future
Serax and his partner Flexso Already look at additional functions to fully automate the process. In this way, employees in customer service no longer have to open the emails and they no longer have to move the PDF file using drag & drop. “We develop a proof of concept to fully automate the process. The file attachment is taken over directly from the mailbox in SAP S/4HANA,” emphasizes Goris. “The customer service employees are also notified if something is missing. You will be notified about functions for situation processing so that you know when you have to intervene.”
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