How Bus Industrial Tools saves 68% of the time per sales order with Rossum

The challenge

A family-run business originating from Northeast Netherlands, Bus Industrial Tools has grown into twelve branches since 1957. With a robust presence across the Netherlands and the UK, Bus Industrial supplies tools for the offshore industry and local retailers. With its rich customer base ranging from industry leaders like Shell to local corner stores, Bus Industrial constantly strives to enhance the customer experience. 

Bus Industrial has recently initiated a new service seeking to unburden its customers from having to handle the bulk of the tools management processes, such as tools maintenance and inspection, as well as some IT processes. The ordering process has historically been a demanding experience, and Bus Industrial wants to make this process as smooth as possible by performing more and more steps of the ordering workflow on behalf of the customer. Improving business services and support allows Bus Industrial to grow and curate long-term strategic relationships with customers. 

As some of Bus Industrial’s largest customers used EDI to place their orders while medium-sized customers prefer sending a sales order via PDF, one of the team’s main goals was to streamline and smooth out the purchasing process for the customers. With a rule-based data extraction solution for sales order PDFs already in place, the company wanted to improve the system’s speed and quality of data output. 

On top of that, the legacy solution that Bus Industrial utilized could have been more adaptable. Every small change in a PDF’s layout caused the team to spend time and effort to set up and maintain order processing for a variety of documents and layouts from a large pool of customers. The team sought a more reliable solution that could integrate seamlessly within its existing processes and wouldn’t require many resources to rebuild from scratch. 

During this search, the team at Bus Industrial came across Rossum’s free trial. With a user-friendly UI and high accuracy right out of the box, the team discovered that Rossum met all their requirements. Rossum’s extensive API documentation and ability to easily integrate into other systems were key factors that contributed to Rossum being their ideal solution. 

The solution

Starting with four branches, Rossum rolled out two custom-trained engines to alleviate Bus Industrial’s data extraction problems. Going global across all twelve Bus Industrial offices next year is the goal. 

Today, the Rossum-powered process supports several stages of the order-to-cash workflow within the Bus Industrial process. 

• Sales representatives primarily oversee the ordering process on behalf of Bus Industrial customers. The team is now able to maintain an overview of the entire sales process without spending excessive effort to onboard the solution and keep it running.
• Once sales orders arrive in the system and data is extracted, users can perform corrections if required. 
• Automation blockers were customer configured by the team to help highlight only documents that require additional attention due to not meeting custom business logic. 

Bus Industrial’s IT  team additionally developed a custom integration allowing the original PDF of the scanned document to be inserted into the Mavis Didata ERP platform, making it an effective archiving solution. Instead of manually matching the data in the ERP system, the process of line matching is now automated in the Rossum platform. The new solution allows the Bus Industrial team to perform their tasks more efficiently. 

To allow the constant improvement of the processes. Bus Industrial’s team regularly incorporates Rossum’s newest product updates.

The impact

Rossum helped Bus Industrial completely remove manual data entry and to automate multiple steps within the order-to-cash process. The company now has full oversight of final numbers without adding a significant workload effort. Rossum’s features, such as user-friendly UI requiring no training and multiple automation and integrations built out by the IT team, have been instrumental in improving overall internal satisfaction. This has also helped to enhance Bus Industrial’s customer satisfaction rates greatly. Overall, Bus Industrial estimates saving over 80% of the time previously spent on running the order-to-cash process. 

With the plan to implement the solution across the remaining eight Bus Industrial’s twelve branches next year, the team is confident of vast improvements. Once the full rollout happens, only one specialist is estimated to be needed to oversee the global production end-to-end and scaling. Additionally, the team is planning to extend Rossum usage by leveraging its out-of-the-box solution for Accounts Payable to process all incoming invoices as well as sales orders and order confirmations. This project is consistent with the company’s effort to consolidate and unify the processes and tech stack globally and, in turn, improve the customer experience.