The Customer
Sports & Leisure Group is a Belgian manufacturing company, highly specialised in the development & production of artificial grass for sports and leisure applications. Over the years this group has developed into one of the leading suppliers of high-quality artificial turf. Company headquarters are located in Sint-Niklaas, Belgium.
The Challenge
Sports & Leisure Group was faced with a high workload of administrative tasks. Within the Finance department, thousands of vendor invoices need to be processed per year. Information needs to be extracted from the invoices and added into SAP. Moreover, gathering all necessary approvals for vendor invoices used to be a manual and paper-based process.
Within the Operations department, the entry of new orders required lots of administrative work. PDF order forms submitted by customers of Sports & Leisure Group needed to be inputted in the ERP System, requiring lots of repetitive steps and giving rise to potential typing errors.
The Solution
Robonext successfully implemented an Intelligent Automation solution consisting of RPA (Microsoft Power Automate) , Artificial Intelligence by (Metamaze) and a Low Code application (Microsoft Power App).
Within Metamaze, several document models were trained that are able to extract information from a wide variety of invoices as well as orders. Not only header information, but also line items are extracted reliably through a continuously improving model.
Next, the RPA robots enter the extracted information into the ERP system SAP. Extensive error handling was included to make sure the robots behave as expected in case exceptions or errors are encountered.
The third component of the technical solution is a Power App, a user-friendly low code application that enables Sports & Leisure Group to manage the necessary approvals and that ensures that only authorised personnel are able to retrieve their invoices.
The Results
Thanks to the automation solution developed by robonext, Sports & Leisure Group has increased internal productivity, reduced errors and improved customer satisfaction.
In the words of Geerard Demoen, Group Financial & Business Controller: “RPA is the next step in every process of our company: Finance, Supply Chain, Sales, … We contacted robonext to come up with a solution for the processing and approval of vendor invoicing and robonext went the extra mile. Manual input has been reduced, paperwork decreased significantly and our accountants can focus more on their qualitative tasks. Without the RPA solution of robonext, we would have had to recruit an additional FTE as we are growing double digits every year. Robonext have definitely proven themselves and will be our preferred partner for RPA solutions in the future.”
