Digitizing Forms and Automating Orders Cosmetics Company Relies on Retarus
The global market-leading cosmetics company employs around 85,000 workers in 150 countries and achieves roughly 27 billion Euros in turnover with over 30 brands in the luxury, consumer and professional products sectors. For digital communications which are not subject to media disruption, the company has opted for Retarus Intelligent Document Processing.
Initial Situation
Media Disruption in the Ordering Process
The delivery and billing processes at the cosmetics company are already digitalized to a large extent – from online orders all the way through to billing by way of EDI. Yet, while the digitalization of the company’s communication with its suppliers is well advanced, the same cannot be said for the communication with customers. As a result, unwanted media disruption occurs over and over again in the ordering process. The reason is that many retailers are lacking the financial and technical means to transmit data in a structured, digital way. These processes often rely on pre-defined, paper-based order forms or unstructured electronic documents – often received by the customer care department by way of fax, email or post. Entering these orders manually into the ERP system requires a great deal of costly effort on the part of staff.
Objective
Seamless Full Digitalization to Reduce Burden on Staff
The fact that orders coming in from retailers, including hand-filled order forms, need to be entered manually into the ERP system means that valuable resources are then lacking for other important, time-intensive processes. For cosmetics companies, especially those in the luxury and professional cosmetic products sectors, it is absolutely essential to give customers individual and personal care while continually enhancing the customer experience in order to withstand the competition. To accomplish this, employees need to be unburdened through automating manual ordering processes to ensure that orders reach the cosmetics company’s SAP system without any media disruption.
“Retarus supports the global market-leading cosmetics company in automating its customer ordering processes as fully as possible. Retarus’ Intelligent Document Recognition, which goes well beyond pure text recognition, enables near error-free text recognition even of hand-written orders, which Retarus digitizes and transfers directly into our customer’s SAP systems. The customer care employees now have the opportunity to care for their customers more intensively, resulting in increased satisfaction amongst both staff and customers.”
Nathalie Mann, Account Director – Business Integration, retarus GmbH
Challenge
Validate Unstructured Data
Retarus Intelligent Document Processing receives the orders arriving by fax or email on behalf of the cosmetics company. At Retarus the forms are first run through an Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR) process. This captures the structure of the document in addition to the text contained within it – even for hand-filled forms. With the assistance of catalogue data, which has been saved in the system and is constantly synchronized, the details of the order are checked with regard to their content and mapped Retarus then transfers the validated data in the required format, along with the original document, to the SAP system at the cosmetics company. In the event that an order is not fully recognized, for instance due to illegible hand-writing, the corresponding document is marked with a lock flag. This makes it clear at once in the ERP system that manual post-processing is required. The fields that need to be reviewed are clearly marked. In this case, the order form is sent directly, along with the original, to the customer service team.
Retarus Products
Benefit
Unburdening Staff, Improving the Cash Flow
No matter whether orders are received by fax or email, and irrespective of whether the details have been recorded in a form, consist of unstructured data or are hand-written: Retarus’ Intelligent Document Recognition identifies the content and structure of documents reliably. The orders digitized in this way are then fed directly into the cosmetics company’s SAP systems in the required format by Retarus Intelligent Document Processing. This high degree of automation enables the corporation’s customer care department to accelerate the entire ordering process, increase its reliability and improve the cash flow. Customer care employees no longer have to capture incoming order details manually, but instead are able to care more intensively for their customers, thus improving the customer experience.
Key Facts
- Digitalizing and automating incoming orders
- Reducing manual post-processing efforts
- Enhancing the customer experience
- Accelerating processes and improving cash flow
Conclusion
Digitalization of Other Inbound Documents
Retarus supports the global market-leading cosmetics company in automating their process for dealing with customer orders as completely as possible. Intelligent document recognition which goes well beyond pure text recognition enables error-free reading of incoming orders. The digitized documents are then made available directly in the company’s ERP system. In addition to customer care, a number of other departments at the corporation receive their inbound documents through various channels. So as the next step, the company plans to roll out Retarus Intelligent Document Processing to these scenarios, for instance to automate the reception of inbound invoices.
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