The Company: Alumil
Alumil is the leading company in the production of innovative aluminum systems for the construction of windows, doors, and building facades, with a presence in more than 30 countries and production facilities in Greece and abroad. The company serves a wide range of customers, offering high-quality products for residential buildings, commercial premises, and public works.
Challenges Faced by Alumil
Alumil faced several challenges in the processes of order and document management:
- Different languages and order structures: Alumil receives Purchase Orders (P.O.) from 20 different international customers across various countries, which means that orders are in different languages and structures. This made the order entry process extremely time-consuming and prone to errors.
- Order complexity: Each P.O. includes a product list with the requested specifications (material, color, length, etc.) as well as product quantities. While this information is often available in Alumil’s information system, there are cases where the specifications are derived from the P.O. Furthermore, the ordering of certain SKUs requires Alumil to create additional SKUs beyond those listed.
- Specialized technical knowledge: The Alumil personnel responsible for entering the orders needed to have in-depth knowledge of the technical specifications of the products and the ERP system requirements, making the process time-consuming and demanding.
- Time and errors: The manual entry of orders and the need for adjustments depending on the language and structure of each document resulted in significant time loss and increased risk of errors.
The PaperEntry Solution
To address these challenges, Alumil adopted PaperEntry, which provided solutions to each issue:
- Recognition and data extraction: PaperEntry has the ability to recognize concepts and data regardless of the document’s structure, allowing Alumil to extract critical information (profile, material, color, quantity, etc.) from orders in any language and structure.
- Automated transformation: PaperEntry, in collaboration with the UTILIZE team, can process and transform the recognized information, ensuring that orders are correctly entered into the ERP without requiring manual transformation.
- Automated checks: PaperEntry incorporates automated checks to ensure the accuracy of the information entered into the ERP, reducing errors related to human intervention.
- Language support and international orders: PaperEntry can recognize and process orders in different languages without requiring special language knowledge from employees, solving the issue of international orders with language barriers.
Results / Benefits
By adopting PaperEntry, Alumil achieved significant results:
- Digital transformation of processes and full automation of order entry, accelerating the overall process and reducing errors.
- 50% reduction in the time required to manage incoming orders, easing employees’ workload and increasing efficiency.
- Increased accuracy in entries and improved data quality in the ERP.
- Real-time reporting, providing immediate insight into the order status and facilitating decision-making at all company levels.
- Integration of orders in multiple languages, eliminating language barriers and simplifying the management process.
Conclusions
Through the digitization and automation of its processes, Alumil managed to improve its efficiency, facilitating the management of high order volumes and providing critical information for production and financial processes. Additionally, the order and document entry process became faster, reducing costs and the time required for processing.
The collaboration with PaperEntry demonstrates the importance of digital transformation in modernizing business processes and enhancing efficiency in an international market.
