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.

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.