Serax, a Belgian design brand with an international presence, crafts contemporary homeware. Collaborating with renowned designers and artisans worldwide, Serax creates distinctive collections of tableware, furniture, lighting, and other home accessories. The company designs pieces in Europe and manufactures them globally.
Serax is a customer-centric company that prioritizes excellent service for its B2B and B2C customers. It was precisely this customer focus that led Serax to implement SAP Business AI solutions to help automate its order-to-cash process.
The challenge
The order process is straightforward for most customers, including B2C. Customers order what they want on the web shop, and the order is directly entered into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.
However, Serax’s B2B customers often still place orders by generating a PDF in their ERP system and automatically sending it to Serax’s customer service mailbox. These B2B manual orders amount to 30% of all orders coming into Serax.
Serax’s strong commitment to customer service means the company is happy to facilitate this, but it strains the customer service team. Once Serax receives the order, the customer service team must manually download the PDF, double-check dates and quantities, and then enter the order details into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition to create the sales order. This entire process is time-consuming and error-prone.
“Providing excellent service is one of our core priorities, and this can be enabled by gaining efficiencies in certain processes,” says Sara Goris, SAP product manager at Serax. “That’s basically what led us to this use case. Our customer service team was still entering 30% of all orders manually into the system. We wanted to streamline that process from our side, especially since many of our customers will continue to send sales orders in PDF format.”
The solution
Serax needed a solution to automatically create sales orders from PDFs. It achieved this by activating and fine-tuning an app called Create Sales Orders—Automatic Extraction. This app was built with SAP solutions for quote-to-cash management using SAP Fiori, which allows businesses to create web and mobile applications.
With the app, Serax can drag and drop the PDF from the customer’s e-mail into the app before it orchestrates the entire process. First, it sends the PDF to SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), where document information extraction extracts the data. The document API uses pre-trained AI to take PDF files as inputs and return structured data. The second step is data matching. The application maps the extracted data to the master data, such as sold-to party, ship-to party, and product. This helps ensure the extracted data from the PDFs makes sense in the context of Serax’s business.
A sales order request is created, and the customer service employee is notified to review it and convert it into an actual sales order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.
Results
The application has cut the number of manual B2B orders by 33%.
The time saved lets Serax invest back into better customer service. “Time savings mean our customer service employees can spend more time on real customer service instead of putting in an order,” says Ragna Qvick, digital business manager and HR performance manager at Serax. Serax’s employees also have more time for value-adding activities like upselling or cross-selling.
This jump in efficiency enables Serax to grow its business by adding more capacity for the team. “We either needed more resources or for our existing people to become more efficient so that they can focus on more value-adding tasks for our customers,” Goris says.
Another benefit of automation is reduced errors, as customer service employees no longer need to enter precise values from the PDF when creating sales orders. Instead, they can rely on document extraction to populate the order; they only need to confirm the values. “It reduces the risk of errors because when it’s a human action, there’s always a chance of errors in quantities or other details,” Qvick says.
Future
Serax and its partner Flexso are already looking at additional capabilities to automate the flow fully. This way, customer service employees will no longer need to open the emails and drag and drop the PDF. “We have a proof of concept running to automate the process fully. It will pick up the attachment from the mailbox directly into SAP S/4HANA,” Goris says. “It will also inform the customer service rep if anything is missing. They get a notification via Situation Handling to know when to intervene.”
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