Orders arrive at the company by e-mail, fax or even by post. Sales mailboxes are full, faxes are scanned, letters are opened and laboriously entered manually. In the age of digital B2B commerce, this process not only seems outdated – it costs time, money and nerves.
Incorrect entries, double bookings, misunderstandings. What begins as a small blur in the order can quickly lead to real problems:
“What am I supposed to do with 100 pallets of beer? I only ordered 10 crates!”
This article is about how cbs AID avoids errors during extraction so that what was ordered is actually delivered.
With cbs AID (Advanced Integration of Documents), cbs automates the entire process of order processing – from recognition to integration into the ERP system. The solution is based on state-of-the-art AI technology and comprises three key steps:
1. Document receipt
Orders reach a company in a variety of ways, often via a dedicated mailbox. In the case of a general sales mailbox, a mail classification is implemented to filter out actual orders.
For each order, the content of the message including attachments is then used for extraction – this also includes longer conversations that arise from queries about the order or corrections. If orders arrive at the company by fax or letter, they usually reach cbs AID via an automated API integration or a user-controlled mass upload.
2. Extracting Documents
Invoices often contain handwritten elements and long lists. This makes extraction challenging. This is where the standard cbs AID process, consisting of the Read document and Understand document modules, comes into play.
Document reading:
First, all incoming documents are normalized. Rotation errors are corrected, texts on scans are read and various document formats are standardized. This creates a consistent basis for further processing, regardless of the form of the incoming document.
Document understanding:
cbs AID is based on an AI agent that mimics a human in understanding the document. An AI agent always has an overarching goal, in this case the extraction of complex data. To achieve this goal, the AI agent has tools at its disposal that allow it, for example, to enlarge important areas on documents or reliably interpret long tables. In addition, the AI agent receives instructions that are tailored to the orders and special features of the respective order process. These instructions are comparable to the documentation that would be given to a new employee who has the task of processing orders.
Leveraging this cognitive approach, cbs AID achieves extraction rates of over 99%. In addition, this approach is much more robust, as format changes do not require any adaptation of the process.
3. Integration into the system
Integration into the target system is where things get particularly exciting. Article numbers, quantities and prices must be validated as well as possible to avoid extraction errors.
First, the extracted article numbers are checked. It is checked whether they exist in the target system. If only article numbers of the ordering customer are listed, the system checks whether these can be assigned to internal article numbers.
The article numbers can be used to validate the available quantities and prices from the supplier’s system. The next step is to check whether the quantities and units of measure make sense in relation to the prices. Customers often do not adhere to the supplier’s specifications in their unit of measure designations, but these deviations can usually be clarified automatically in this validation step.
Of course, clearly defined rules also play an important role in validation. For example, orders above a certain extracted scope of delivery or from certain customers can still be forwarded to a human before being created as a sales order.
Conclusion
cbs AID achieves extraction rates of over 99% through the use of state-of-the-art AI technology. A 100% extraction rate can never be guaranteed. Therefore, the integration of rule-based validation steps after extraction is the perfect solution and enables an automated process that only requires human interaction in exceptional cases.
Accordingly, the use of cbs AID offers our customers the following benefits:
- Cost savings through automation
- Relief for the specialist department: employees are freed from monotonous tasks and can concentrate on special cases
- Minimization of errors
- Quick scalability to other document types in the company
Our solution is not limited to incoming invoices and orders. It can be adapted to all other document types such as payment advice notes, long-term supplier declarations, product data, delivery bills and safety data sheets.
Vision
In this case, we are talking about a process automated by AI. The next milestone is an AI-based process. In concrete terms, this means that the entire order processing process would be taken over by the AI, including communication with the customer, for example. If information is missing or incorrect on the order, the AI contacts the customer itself by email and only calls for human help if absolutely necessary.
We integrate any complex, human-readable document into SAP.
Contact us to learn more!
