Ludwig Meister’s corporate customers order the desired products in different ways. Large companies generate them directly from their ERP systems, others send a PDF by e-mail or fax. The problem is that every order looks different in its structure – and that with around 1000 orders per day. The structure of a PDF may be different between two clients, although both may use the same software.

With an assortment of more than 2. 5 million products, a lot of manual work is still required. Employees do not only have to deal with a number of different order formats. The orders had to be assigned to the correct product catalogue and searched manually for identifiable attributes such as item numbers, quantities and prices. Unlike in B2C commerce, there is no uniform European Article Number (EAN) for most of the deliverable products. Some of the customers simply use a known product name out of habit, although the manufacturer has already used a different name. Ludwig Meister was looking for a system that could process highly individual and complex documents automatically and commissioned T-Systems MMS with the solution.

Expectations of the system have been fully met for the trading company. Semasuite® achieves the desired detection accuracy of 80 percent for incoming PDF files, helping employees to capture and process new orders. The time saving is around 70 percent compared to the previously purely manual process. This increase in efficiency gives sales employees more freedom to devote themselves more time to advising customers and other sales activities. After all, it is primarily about the value-adding function of sales, not data collection. And thanks to the faster processing, Ludwig Meister manages to fulfill his promise of order processing on the same day.