Phoenix Con­tact uses AI to cre­ate an auto­mat­ed work­flow for record­ing, pro­cess­ing and archiv­ing incom­ing orders and invoic­es. Process­es could be sig­nif­i­cant­ly opti­mized and work­flows accel­er­at­ed.Thank you for read­ing this post, don’t for­get to sub­scribe!

Phoenix Con­tact has been devel­op­ing elec­tron­ic prod­ucts for con­nect­ing, dis­trib­ut­ing or con­trol­ling ener­gy or data flows since 1923 and oper­ates glob­al­ly as a fam­i­ly-owned com­pa­ny with 22,000 employ­ees world­wide. Although EDI is gain­ing impor­tance for order trans­mis­sion, more than one thou­sand orders are received dai­ly via var­i­ous chan­nels as PDFs, often con­tain­ing hun­dreds of order items. In addi­tion to the sheer vol­ume of orders, same-day pro­cess­ing in the order receiv­ing depart­ment is com­pli­cat­ed by the pos­si­bil­i­ty of very indi­vid­ual cus­tomer require­ments — a par­tic­u­lar com­pet­i­tive advan­tage of Phoenix Con­tact. Pre­vi­ous­ly, man­u­al pro­cess­ing took a lot of time and was prone to errors.

To auto­mate order tak­ing, the com­pa­ny decid­ed to use the smart prod­uct fam­i­ly from Insid­ers Tech­nolo­gies, which, in addi­tion to AI-sup­port­ed data recog­ni­tion and self-learn­ing soft­ware, has exten­sive options for indi­vid­ual expan­sion. Based on a free-form approach, the smart ORDER auto­mat­ed order pro­cess­ing ser­vice intel­li­gent­ly match­es cus­tomer mas­ter and item data and cap­tures all order-rel­e­vant data regard­less of the form and its place­ment on the order. In the process, miss­ing or illeg­i­ble infor­ma­tion is for­ward­ed to a post-proces­sor (“human-in-the-loop”). After extrac­tion and clas­si­fi­ca­tion, the data is trans­ferred to the SAP sys­tem.

“We can rec­om­mend the Insid­ers Tech­nolo­gies solu­tion. We now have a uni­fied tool that can be used by all employ­ees and speeds up our process­es.”

Ste­fan Kirch­hoff, Dig­i­tal Process and Solu­tions Man­ag­er at Phonix Con­tact, prais­es the new solu­tion. “With Insid­ers Tech­nolo­gies, we have a ser­vice provider that knows what it is doing and takes time for the cus­tomer. Both the com­mer­cial and tech­ni­cal advice con­vinced us, and the sup­port is com­pe­tent and fast when the shoe pinch­es.”

Togeth­er with the inte­gra­tion of smart INVOICE for pro­cess­ing incom­ing invoic­es and deliv­ery bills, a homo­ge­neous sys­tem land­scape was cre­at­ed at Phoenix Con­tact through­out the entire group. Phoenix Con­tact now has a sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduced effort for the post-pro­cess­ing of doc­u­ments thanks to the smart prod­uct fam­i­ly from Insid­ers Tech­nolo­gies, which accel­er­ates many busi­ness process­es in O2C and P2P. Reduced sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty to errors, more secu­ri­ty and work­load reduc­tion for employ­ees as well as more effi­cient and accel­er­at­ed process­es increase busi­ness suc­cess and cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion. For the future, Phoenix Con­tact is already plan­ning to expand the use of smart com­po­nents for fur­ther inno­va­tions in doc­u­ment han­dling.