The challenge

Every day, hundreds of order confirmations arrive in Van Marcke's mailbox. Usually, this information is embedded in a pdf file, from which information has to be copied into Van Marcke's mainframe. Until recently, this process was done entirely manually. After realizing this was an extremely time-consuming and non-value-adding task, Van Marcke called in our AI expertise combined with RoboRana's RPA bots. We automated this process with our Intelligent Document Processing tool, Klassif.ai.

The solution

Together with RoboRana, we combined artificial intelligence and RPA into a single solution. Our AI tool, Klassif.ai, receives the PDFs from a Blue Prism RPA bot. During the next step, the tool uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology and converts unstructured data such as product names, quantities, and amounts into structured data.

To recognize the unstructured data, the AI tool had to be trained first. In the early stages, the employees had to intervene manually by showing the tool where to find an amount or indicating the difference between an invoice and delivery data. Through this kind of training, the system became smarter and gains insight into how the orders are usually structured. As a result, the tool can now classify Van Marcke's order confirmation without help.

As a final step, one of RoboRana's virtual workers enters that structured data into the mainframe. As a result, the order confirmation process happens fully automatically instead of manually.

The results

The time and efficiency gains from this intelligent process automation story are enormous. Stijn Hoegaerts, IT manager at Van Marcke, explains:

"In the first month, almost 7.000 PDFs were processed. If you know that an employee usually needs 1 to 2 minutes per document, this results in 10 hours saved per day on average. This is an immense amount of time that can be used for more value-adding tasks."

Moreover, the error margin that was involved in manual processing has also been reduced, as both the interpretation by Klassif.ai and entry by the RPA bots are as good as error-free. Therefore, Van Marcke can provide a better customer experience, as Van Marcke can now share delivery times to the customer more quickly and transparently. Finally, employee happiness has increased as there is more time to do interesting tasks instead of repetitive ones.