Edgard & Cooper: order creation is four times faster thanks to hyperautomation

Edgard & Cooper produces food for dogs and cats. Their customer service department struggled with manually processing numerous orders received by email. Hyperautomation of this process led to a quick win on several fronts. Order entry is now four times faster than before. The time saved is entirely dedicated to customer care.

Edgard & Cooper is an innovative Belgian producer of dog and cat food. They distinguish themselves through a strong emphasis on natural ingredients and sustainability. A portion of their proceeds goes to charities that support the welfare of pets.

"My team records the orders, arranges the logistics, and manages customer relations," says Anke De Prijck, customer service manager at Edgard & Cooper. "Logistics takes up 60% of our time. However, we spent 35% of our time manually entering orders from customer emails."

TheValueChain was commissioned to explore how hyperautomation could enhance business processes throughout the company. They identified 29 processes. The order creation process was one of the quick-win use cases with a clear return on investment.

TheValueChain implemented robotic process automation (RPA), integrated with SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud. Edgard & Cooper chose the technology of Metamaze. With AI, machine learning, and no-code techniques, Metamaze extracts and classifies data from emails and documents.

Anke explains: "Metamaze reads the emails and the attachments because that's where 99% of the orders are. Metamaze extracts the relevant information for creating a sales order in SAP. If the information is incomplete or incorrect, SAP BTP (see box) creates a user task. Once the information is supplemented or corrected, the order creation process continues in SAP. The system has a process visibility dashboard based on real-time data analysis, providing insight into figures and KPIs. For example, we monitor how many orders generate user tasks and what the cause is. These insights are crucial if you want to continue improving the processes."

Nine months after the go-live, the automation of order creation is fully meeting expectations. "Previously, the team spent 35% of their working time on manual entry of orders from emails," says Anke. "That time has been halved. 61% of the orders that we used to enter manually are created by Metamaze. Of these, 65% proceeded without user tasks. As a result, the team gained 335 hours. The time freed up is entirely dedicated to customer care. This will continue to evolve in the future."

The most important advantage? "Previously, we averaged 4 minutes to create one order; today it is only 1 minute," Anke emphasises. "The operational cost has decreased. Moreover, with manual order creation, a typing error is easily made. Thanks to automation, order processing is also becoming more accurate. The customer experience has improved, as has the team's job satisfaction."

"Since the company's start in 2016, Edgard & Cooper has experienced a steep development path," concludes Anke. "The new approach equips our team for further expected growth."

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