MKS Atotech Cuts Order Processing Time by 70% with Rossum-Powered
E-commerce Automation

Atotech is a brand of MKS Instruments, a NASDAQ-listed company, delivering specialty chemicals, equipment, service, and software for electroplating and surface-finishing solutions. Their products serve high-precision industries across the globe including printed circuit board and package substrate manufacturing, semiconductor advanced packaging, and general metal finishing.

Building digital sales from the ground up

When Dennis van den Hoek joined Atotech in 2021, the company had no digital sales capabilities whatsoever. He was brought on to build an e-commerce channel from scratch, with three strategic goals in mind:

• Improve customer experience: Give customers a 24/7 self-serve portal to place orders, track shipments, view dashboards, and manage their account
• Grow revenue: Enable upselling, cross-selling, and reduce churn by improving loyalty and customer satisfaction
• Gain operational efficiency: Eliminate scattered, undocumented manual processes and replace them with structured, standardized workflows

The team rolled out the e-commerce platform starting in China, then expanded globally, driving a large portion of the division’s revenue through the digital sales channel.

Why channel-agnostic automation is a must

The e-commerce portal worked well for small and medium-sized customers who could log in and place orders directly. However, enterprise buyers relied on their own procurement software, and asking them to duplicate orders in a separate portal was not viable.

• Before any automation, customer service staff manually created every order in SAP, a process that took anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes per order.
• Processes varied significantly across markets, creating a fragmented and error-prone operation

The team initially explored punchout integration as a way to connect directly with customers’ procurement systems, but after six months of research, it proved far too expensive and technically complex.

API-first integration unlocks fast go-live

MKS` Atotech chose flexibility.

They partnered with Rossum to build a Purchase Order Scanning (POS) solution that connects via API to the company’s existing e-commerce platform, instead of integrating with the SAP ERP directly. This allowed the team to move fast, going live within approximately four months for the first wave of customers.

“What set Rossum apart was two things: proven experience in order processing use cases beyond accounts payable, and the flexibility to integrate through APIs rather than being hardcoded into the ERP. That made all the difference for us.”

— Dennis van den Hoek, Global E-commerce Lead, MKS` Atotech

The architecture is straightforward:

• Customers send their purchase orders as PDF attachments to a dedicated email address
• Rossum extracts and validates the order data using AI-based extraction and fuzzy logic matching
• Validated orders are pushed via API into the MKS` Atotech e-commerce platform
• The e-commerce platform forwards the structured order data into SAP ECC for fulfillment

Key Capabilities

• Fuzzy logic matching: Rossum ingests a rolling 12-month feed of customer purchase history via API, using it to accurately match material codes, customer names, and ship-to addresses even when customers use their own material codes, no codes at all, or have multiple ship-to locations.
• Flexible routing across 15+ queues: Orders are organized by market and country across more than 15 queues, allowing regional operations teams to manage their own workflows.
• Manual override and correction: When a PO is incomplete or contains errors, operators can adjust data directly within Rossum to keep the order moving, avoiding unnecessary rejections.

“We were able to seamlessly integrate Rossum into our platform without the need of any external adapters or custom bespoke developments. It was pretty straightforward.”

— Richard Felix, IT Lead, MKS` Atotech

70% faster orders and 85% customer satisfaction

The Rossum implementation delivered results across all key objectives:

• Order processing time reduced by 70%: What previously took 5 to 15 minutes now takes under 1.5 minutes.
• 50% of e-commerce volume through Rossum: Half of all orders placed through the e-commerce channel now flow through Rossum’s PO automation.
• 85%+ customer satisfaction: Customers rate their experience highly, with CSAT consistently above 85%.
• Improved data quality and SOPs: The implementation created a forcing function to standardize PO requirements and clean up master data in SAP.

“With Rossum, the order processing time decreased by 70%, and it’s less than a minute and a half now. We have a more efficient and reliable order intake process, and we’re planning to improve it even further and grow the business with the solution we’ve built.”

— Dennis van den Hoek, Global E-commerce Lead, MKS` Atotech

The future: More regions, more automation, one shared roadmap

MKS` Atotech’s journey with Rossum is far from over:

• Americas go-live: Expanding to the Americas to complete global coverage across all seven regions.
• Spare parts expansion: The team is working to extend the Rossum-powered order flow beyond chemicals into spare parts and additional product lines
• Increasing automation rate: Currently all orders are reviewed by a human operator to ensure accuracy; increasing the straight-through processing rate toward full automation is a top roadmap priority