Faster and flawless order processes for Nilfisk

Why did this project come to be?

Digitalization of manual processes

The Danish group Nilfisk is busy digitalizing both products and processes. The company, who launched its first iconic Nilfisk model for Danish consumers in 1906, is today among the world’s leading manufacturers of vacuum cleaners and cleaning equipment. Nilfisk’s IT strategy from 2017 focuses among other things on strengthening the overall IT integration and increasing digitalization across the company’s products and processes. The sales order process requires the most manual key entries and was thereby obvious to digitalize. A sales order can come in different formats, from a Word file to raw text in an email, and consist of hundreds of order lines with different products to be delivered to different addresses. Converting these orders into one file format, enter the order into the system and validate all the information could take a couple of days of work. Therefore, the goal was to ensure a simple, standardized and first and foremost automated process for sales order scanning, validation and registration in the ERP system. The process increases the efficiency and compliance at Nilfisk.

How did we solve it?

First-mover with the order robot

It was through Nilfisk’s close collaborations with NTT DATA Business Solutions that the company got acquainted with MAKIRA Capture – a software robot developed to handle all types of business documents.

MAKIRA Capture was being developed to also handle sales orders, and thus we are the first company in the world using MAKIRA for sales orders. So far, we have implemented MAKIRA in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, and approximately 20 % of our overall incoming orders in the Nordic countries are received through it. This number increases each month, says Marcus Faber Kappendrup, Business Systems Consultant, Group IT, Nilfisk A/S.

What changed for the better?

Consequently, we are very excited about the solution. More precisely, we send an incoming order to a specific email address, after which the automatic process starts. After the automatic entry of the order in SAP, we still always check it manually. This does not change the fact that with big and complex orders, MAKIRA Capture saves us many hours daily, and with small orders we save many minutes daily. Most importantly, we can now use the time saved from manual order entries to provide our customers even better service, says Lena Melander.