This Design Brand Is Automating 30% of Its Orders with AI — Is It Enough?

When we think about AI and technology, what comes to mind is usually a flashy internet company. However, that’s not the case. Recently, a Belgian homeware brand called Serax implemented SAP’s Business AI into its daily workflow to reduce some of its manual data entry work. 

What Was the Problem?

Earlier, the company had to rely on manual order processing. Almost one-third of Serax’s business-to-business (B2B) orders arrived as PDFs, emailed by customers, and then manually entered by Serax’s customer service team into its SAP system. The process was slow, error-prone, and increasingly unsustainable.

Providing excellent service is one of our core priorities, and this can be enabled by gaining efficiencies in certain processes. That’s basically what led us to this use case. Our customer service team was still entering 30% of all orders manually into the system. We wanted to streamline that process from our side, especially since many of our customers will continue to send sales orders in PDF format.

Sara Goris, SAP product manager at Serax

In order to tackle this situation, Serax implemented an app called Create Sales Orders – Automatic Extraction, which is powered by SAP Business AI. It uses document information extraction and data-matching tools within the SAP Business Technology Platform to process PDF-based sales orders. Instead of manually inputting data, employees now drag and drop files into the app, which then extracts the order details, checks them against master data (such as product codes and customer details), and creates a sales order request. A team member still reviews it before final submission.

What Was the Result?

As a result, Serax has been able to cut manual B2B orders by 33%, freeing up staff time and lowering the risk of data entry errors. According to the company, this has allowed employees to focus more on higher-value tasks like upselling or resolving customer issues.

However, the system is not fully automated yet. As the company still needs employees to move emails and attachments into the app, which limits the potential time savings. Serax says it’s working on a proof of concept with implementation partner Flexso to automate the final stretch. The ultimate goal is to extract PDFs directly from email inboxes and trigger sales order creation without any manual drag-and-drop.

If that solution works, the system will notify staff through SAP’s Situation Handling feature whenever something in the document looks off. This will keep the process partially supervised without the need for constant manual labor.

So, while this may not be as flashy as some new-age chatbots or headline-grabbing robotics, eliminating the tedious internal tasks shows how regular companies are embracing AI tech.

However, it will be important to see whether the automation can scale beyond this one use case or offer measurable returns in the long run. For now, Serax’s experiment with SAP Business AI is less about transformation and more about efficiency.  

However, that’s not all at SAP’s end, either. The company is constantly working on adding new features to its suite. For example, recently, the tech giant unveiled its new Cloud ERP Private package, which will help its customers transition to cloud-based ERP solutions. According to the company, this package will accelerate the time to value, drive transformation, and enhance business agility for its users.