Thanks to state-of-the-art AI tech­nol­o­gy from Insid­ers, thyssenk­rupp Mate­ri­als Ser­vices sig­nif­i­cant­ly speeds up the process of order accep­tance and frees up remark­ably more time for per­son­al, indi­vid­ual cus­tomer ser­vice.

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thyssenk­rupp Mate­ri­als Ser­vices (TKMX) real­ly puts their cus­tomers first, as is demon­strat­ed by the fact, among oth­er things, that the cus­tomers have a free choice of how to place their order. Whether by pre-struc­tured order form, by freely for­mu­lat­ed e‑mail or sim­ply as a file attach­ment – the orders received dai­ly are as var­ied as the more than 150,000 prod­ucts and ser­vices offered by the largest inde­pen­dent mate­r­i­al dis­trib­u­tor and ser­vice provider in the West­ern world. And with more than 250,000 cus­tomers in over 30 coun­tries world­wide, this results in an enor­mous het­ero­gene­ity of order doc­u­ments every day.

In order to suc­cess­ful­ly man­age this vol­ume, notably reduce the man­u­al labor required in the process, and increase effi­cien­cy in order pro­cess­ing, TKMX has now opti­mized their entire order process with a smart prod­uct made by Insid­ers.

After a com­pre­hen­sive eval­u­a­tion, the Dig­i­tal Tech­nol­o­gy Office opt­ed for smart ORDER, the tech­no­log­i­cal­ly lead­ing stan­dard prod­uct for auto­mat­ed doc­u­ment pro­cess­ing. From now on thanks to smart ORDER’s intel­li­gent doc­u­ment read­ing and pro­cess­ing, a sig­nif­i­cant pro­por­tion of the inquiries and orders received via e‑mail will be processed com­plete­ly auto­mat­i­cal­ly. The exten­sive automa­tion thus not only ensures sig­nif­i­cant­ly faster order pro­cess­ing, but also opens up poten­tial in sales by pro­vid­ing more time for indi­vid­ual cus­tomer sup­port.

Using AI-based data cap­ture, all nec­es­sary order infor­ma­tion is cap­tured with­in a wide vari­ety of doc­u­ments, miss­ing infor­ma­tion is for­ward­ed to a post-proces­sor, and the extract­ed data is export­ed to the respec­tive process automa­tion sys­tem.

With­in just eight weeks, the Insid­ers project team, togeth­er with the Dig­i­tal Tech­nol­o­gy Office and the dig­i­tal garage of thyssenk­rupp Schulte GmbH, set up a pilot ver­sion and rolled it out ini­tial­ly through­out Ger­many fol­low­ing an inten­sive test phase. After only six weeks, all sales offices in Ger­many were already work­ing suc­cess­ful­ly with smart ORDER and the inter­na­tion­al roll-out to oth­er com­pa­nies was start­ed. Today, more than 600 users at more than 80 loca­tions in nine coun­tries work with the solu­tion in ten TKMX com­pa­nies world­wide.

Over­all, the time need­ed to process the orders has thus been notice­ably reduced with­out restrict­ing cus­tomers’ flex­i­bil­i­ty when plac­ing them. Man­u­al efforts have dropped dras­ti­cal­ly and the sales teams are hap­py to have much more time for indi­vid­ual cus­tomer sup­port.

„For us, cus­tomer-friend­li­ness also means not forc­ing cus­tomers to use EDI or the store, but also accept­ing their inquiries and orders by e‑mail or doc­u­ment and pro­cess­ing them as quick­ly as pos­si­ble. With smart ORDER, we can effi­cient­ly mas­ter the exist­ing het­ero­gene­ity.“

So says Dr.-Ing. Arne Con­rad, Dig­i­tal Tech­nol­o­gy Office at TKMX, and sum­ma­rizes the ben­e­fits for both sides – cus­tomers and com­pa­nies.

Spurred on by the suc­cess of AI-based process automa­tion in their order accep­tance, the Dig­i­tal Tech­nol­o­gy Office is already work­ing on fur­ther appli­ca­tion areas for Insid­ers’ smart prod­ucts.