This is an example from a shared services center for a large pharmaceutical and life-sciences company. The client received a large number of incoming paper-based and faxed orders. The challenge was to process them without the need for excessive manual intervention. Typical issues with incoming orders included:

Orders had different formats and layoutsMetadata information was often missing or inconsistent (i.e. Product IDs, Customer IDs, …)Data content was wrong and/or not comprehensive

The customer used a traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scanning solution to process the paper-documents into an IDOC that could be loaded into SAP and processed automatically.

REDWOOD ROBOTICS™ SOFTWARE FOR SUPPLY CHAIN:ORDER MANAGEMENT

Low matching rateWhile the existing OCR solution delivered a good recognition rate in translating the paper-documents into a text file, it was less proficient at identifying and matching the information to the SAP® master and metadata. Therefore the vast majority of incoming orders still needed manual intervention and data entry.

Manual processing of ordersAfter orders were captured in the system, the subsequent processing was very manual and contained multiple steps

from order checking and confirmation to delivery triggering.

Customer frustration and lost revenuesThe highly manual process lead to frequent delays, error-prone processing and lost orders.

To resolve these issues, Redwood’s robots not only took over the matching of the text converted orders to the required information for the iDoc creation but also automated the order processing itself.

ISSUES

INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION AND PROCESSING OF PAPER-BASED ORDERS

The new robotic matching process is significantly more flexible, as it can complete matches through the use of secondary order information, in cases where the primary information is missing, and compare these to the SAP master data. An example is where the order may not contain the customer ID. The new matching logic will still be able to identify the customer, based on the customer name and address. The process does

not require an exact match but the rules can be defined to define a “sufficient” match. When there is no customer ID for example or when the customer name does not match fit the customer name in SAP exactly, it still will be accepted as a sufficient match, where other customer attributes like bank details or address match. This extended and flexible matching process increased the number of matches from 30% to more than 60%. Even for the remaining mismatches, where staff intervention is needed, the robot provides detailed information on the matching issue and the SAP master data set, to allow the relevant staff member to resolve the issue significantly faster.

The entire order processing has also been robotized. This is not restricted just to the creation and processing of the order iDoc itself but all the steps along the straight-through process like the order checking, order confirmation and triggering of delivery as well as appropriate workflows and exception escalation.

Redwood is able to increase the invoice matching rate with a more sophisticated and flexible rule set, ensure a high rate of straight-through processing of the order as well as speed-up processing and improve accuracy in order to increase customer satisfaction.

ENHANCED MATCHING

AUTOMATED PROCESS

RESULTS

For more information, please visit www.redwood.com/robotics