How Boboli Benelux’s first digital employee now reads and processes orders by fax (!)
Over 400 hours
saved per year
Faster processing time,
fewer errors
Exact, Outlook,
Excel
Boboli bakes more than 100 million loaves annually for foodservice and Retail customers. Boboli’s specialty is baking Mediterranean bread. Boboli supplies, among others, gas stations and supermarkets in many European countries and the rest of the world.
The international nature of Boboli exposes a particular difference between the countries it supplies to, namely the degree of digitalization. RPA is proving to be an effective technology for Boboli to bridge these differences.
Anno 2021: The digital employee who processes orders by fax?
Software robots are increasingly being used to exchange data between ICT systems that cannot “talk” to each other properly. For example, the robot retrieves data from an old legacy system and enters it into a modern Internet application. Sometimes these systems are in different locations and managed by different companies working together in one logistics chain. Such is the case at Boboli.
While the traditional fax is hardly used anywhere in the Netherlands anymore, it is still customary for companies in our eastern neighbors to communicate with each other by fax. This is also the case for a number of Boboli’s customers. These customers place daily orders for large quantities of bread directly from their own ICT systems at Boboli. By fax, in other words.
At Boboli, until recently, these orders had to be entered manually into Exact, the ERP system used by Boboli. Not only was this time-consuming, it was also boring and tedious work. Work that can be done perfectly well by a software robot.
“After the initial UiPath demo by Tacstone, we were immediately excited about the possibilities of RPA at Boboli. It was a logical step for us to start with order processing. It had been an eyesore to me for years that so many orders still had to be entered by hand. Our employees spent many hours each week processing these orders. The new robot is therefore a nice addition to the IT resources we already had .”
Henk Hop | Manager IT
Via OCR reading of orders in pdf format
Fortunately, orders received by fax no longer rattle on paper from a fax machine at Boboli, but are received as PDF files. The order is then actually already “digital,” but actually consists only of an image that cannot simply be read by the computer.
Fortunately, a good solution exists for this technical challenge: OCR (Optical Character Recognition). This makes it possible to recognize and “extract” text from images. This way, the content of a PDF file becomes computer-readable.
Boboli’s software robot uses OCR and can use it to read orders from PDF orders largely automatically. To help the robot recognize the text, the project team developed a so-called “translation table” in Excel. This translation table is filled step-by-step with all known exceptions and rules at country and article level and is consulted by the robot when reading the PDF files.
Time savings, flexibility and scalability
A logical next step after the first project phase was to have orders from other supermarket chains processed by the digital clerk as well. The flexibility of the UiPath platform and the experience gained from the first process ensure that new processes can be built in less than half the time. Changes and expansions in order processing can be implemented ever faster. Flexibility has greatly increased and the use of the digital employee makes the order processing department increasingly scalable. After all, in peak periods, the digital employee processes hundreds of additional orders with the same ease. This way Boboli can be sure that all orders are processed in the shortest possible time and error-free, without any additional human resources. Meanwhile, Boboli thus saves dozens of hours of manual order processing per month. These savings are expected to increase further as the application of RPA is expanded.
