Creating the Perfect Order
100%
Automated extraction of unstructured data
99.8%
Order accuracy increased to 99.8%
15mos
ROI within 15 months
Because the team doesn’t have to spend as much time placing the orders themselves, they can review the orders. Now they can focus on engaging with customers
Business problem
Asahi produces some of the world’s best known beer brands such as Peroni Nastro Azzurro and Asahi Super Dry which are stocked by both large and small retailers across the UK. Consequently, Asahi UK felt they needed to add more value to their customer relationships.
To reach this objective, they looked to digitise the high volume manual data entry processes in their customer service team as part of their ‘Perfect Order’ initiative. The team were receiving non-EDI sales orders via email in varying formats ranging from images to PDFs, word documents and spreadsheets. They were spending valuable time interpreting each order, identifying issues, then entering the order data manually into SAP. With valuable time being spent on manual processes, Asahi began to look at automation solutions.
“Our objective was to get a zero-touch order through automation, so we can deliver timely and accurate order taking, which would then deliver increased customer satisfaction” stated their UK Supply Chain Director. “There’s more demand from our customers”, adds their UK Supply Chain Service Manager, “they expect more from us than they used to. We need to spend more time answering their queries and delivering added-value. We wanted to be paperless, to change the way we had worked from the beginning – and automation seemed like a logical next step”
Asahi’s Main Objectives:
- Automate manual processes so customer services could spend more time working with customers
- Achieve zero touch automation of sales orders
- Increase order capture process standardisation and control
- Automate the validation of orders and manage by exception
The benefits have clearly been realised in terms of building resilience into the team
Solution
To address these business challenges, process leaders turned to OmPrompt. The OmPrompt team designed and implemented a non-EDI sales order automation solution using the platforms ZeroTouch capabilities to fully automate the processing of Asahi’s non-EDI customer orders.
All non-EDI customers were onboarded to the platform without any need to directly involve Asahi’s customers. Extraction rules were set up to cater for each individual sales order format to makes sure that all data would be extracted without anyone from the customer services team having to support the process.
Different data processing rules were configured allowing Asahi to control how orders from all customers are processed and also how individual customers need to be managed. “We run quite a complex business but OmPrompt took the time to understand what the team were going through with each order and took that knowledge, and put it into logical business rules.” These rules automatically identify and resolve exceptions so that manual intervention is kept to a minimum. Checks on the total number of cases ordered by customer, missing delivery dates, unit of measure conversions and identifying different order types are all handled automatically and individual customer behaviours and requirements are catered for.
The team connected the OmPrompt platform with Asahi’s SAP instance so automated sales orders could flow directly into the ERP and appear as EDI orders. The Asahi customer services team didn’t have to configure any software because OmPrompt, as a managed service, take full responsibility for set up.
We run quite a complex business but OmPrompt took the time to understand what the team were going through with each order and took that knowledge, and put it into logical business rule
Results
Order accuracy increased to 99.8%
100% Automated extraction achieved
Increased customer satisfaction
Improved OTIF scores
Freed customer contact resources who can now spend their time visiting and talking to customers
ROI in 15 months
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