Thanks to Insid­ers, Schäfer Shop and Schäfer Werke relieve their employ­ees through high automa­tion rates. With smart INVOICE and smart ORDER, the two Schae­fer fam­i­ly busi­ness­es opti­mize process­es for order entry and invoice pro­cess­ing of all incom­ing doc­u­ments and sig­nif­i­cant­ly increase effi­cien­cy in doc­u­ment pro­cess­ing.

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Every day, count­less incom­ing doc­u­ments and records arrive via a wide range of chan­nels and have to be processed quick­ly and effi­cient­ly – two Schae­fer fam­i­ly busi­ness­es are now mas­ter­ing this every­day chal­lenge with a uni­ver­sal plat­form for intel­li­gent process automa­tion, of course made by Insid­ers.

The com­pa­nies Schäfer Werke GmbH and Schäfer Shop GmbH oper­ate inde­pen­dent­ly world­wide in diver­si­fied busi­ness areas. Schäfer Werke is a lead­ing steel pro­cess­ing com­pa­ny with state-of-the-art pro­duc­tion sites in Ger­many and the Czech Repub­lic. Schäfer Shop, on the oth­er hand, offers its cus­tomers in nine coun­tries high-qual­i­ty fur­ni­ture and com­plete equip­ment for offices, ware­hous­es and fac­to­ries. In order to exploit syn­er­gy effects, the two com­pa­nies work close­ly togeth­er.

When the joint IT team of Schäfer Shop and Schäfer Werke was look­ing for a uni­ver­sal­ly applic­a­ble plat­form that could poten­tial­ly solve all doc­u­ment man­age­ment chal­lenges, they quick­ly found what they were look­ing for in the AI-based Insid­ers prod­ucts smart INVOICE and smart ORDER as the opti­mal basis for all Cog­ni­tive Process Automa­tion tasks.

“We feel very well equipped with the Insid­ers Tech­nolo­gies prod­uct range: it gives us excel­lent solu­tions in both pur­chase-to-pay and order man­age­ment – the best of both worlds, so to speak,”

— explains Patrick Schus­ter, Solu­tion Archi­tect Dig­i­tal Process Inte­gra­tion at Schäfer Shop Group GmbH & Co.KG. “So far, we haven’t reached the lim­its of the plat­form and don’t expect to.”

 

Today, for the entire incom­ing mail of Schäfer Shop in Ger­many and Switzer­land – across all chan­nels such as e‑mails, fax and paper – the smart com­po­nents of Insid­ers rec­og­nize the kind of busi­ness trans­ac­tion for each case and route the inci­dent accord­ing­ly. The approx­i­mate­ly 150,000 orders per year are processed direct­ly with smart ORDER. Around 250,000 incom­ing invoic­es per year are read out in detail by smart INVOICE, val­i­dat­ed and, if nec­es­sary, for­ward­ed to the release work­flow or dark pro­cess­ing. Anoth­er 120,000 or so doc­u­ments, which are dis­trib­uted among around 20 oth­er doc­u­ment class­es, are also processed in a ded­i­cat­ed man­ner.

Sim­i­lar­ly, incom­ing invoice man­age­ment for around 80,000 invoic­es per year was imple­ment­ed for Schäfer Werke in both Ger­many and the Czech Repub­lic. Enthused by the pos­si­bil­i­ties, Schäfer Werke also start­ed dig­i­tiz­ing tech­ni­cal doc­u­ments. Every year, the com­pa­ny receives around 40,000 works and mate­r­i­al inspec­tion cer­tifi­cates from its sup­pli­ers. These also have to be fun­da­men­tal­ly val­i­dat­ed and assigned – a process that is now large­ly auto­mat­ed thanks to the uni­ver­sal capa­bil­i­ties of the Insid­ers plat­form for Cog­ni­tive Process Automa­tion.

And this suc­cess sto­ry does not end there: Schäfer IT is cur­rent­ly plan­ning the intro­duc­tion of com­plete incom­ing mail pro­cess­ing in Aus­tria as well. And in the future, it will also be pos­si­ble to auto­mate the pro­cess­ing of oth­er doc­u­ment class­es in both the com­mer­cial and tech­ni­cal areas using the Insid­ers plat­form.