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.