Villeroy & Boch is a German manufacturer of ceramics operating in two divisions: Tableware, and Bathroom and Wellness. Villeroy & Boch Group is one of Europe’s oldest brands started by the ironmaster François Boch with his three sons in 1748. In 2018, the revenue of Villeroy & Boch was €853.1 million generated by labor of 7991 employees. Learn how RPA technology was provided to this enterprise.
Motivation
To optimize productivity, the company needed its processes to be as efficient as possible and wanted to reduce time spent on repetitive tasks.
Vendor
SAP was selected as a vendor for this project due to the following factors:
•Intuitive functionality of SAP Intelligent RPA services, part of SAP Extension Suite, to create “classic” RPA bots, both attended and unattended that follow predefined workflows based on set business rules without impacting the core SAP ERP infrastructure.
•Development of an intelligent, hyperautomated bot by integrating the classic bot with the Document Classification service, one of the SAP AI Business Services and part of SAP Extension Suite, to autonomously carry out the more complex task of classifying and interpreting e-mail attachments
•Versatility of SAP AI Business Services, such as the Document Information Extraction and Invoice Object Recommendation services, to enable the building of other intelligent bots
Solution
By deploying SAP Intelligent RPA technology with SAP Cloud Platform, Villeroy & Boch Group:
- Enabled tight process integration with the SAP ERP application and productivity solutions.
- Created “attended” bots (under staff supervision) that complete simple, frequently occurring tasks such as responding to standard e-mail inquiries and making general ledger postings.
- Helped customer service staff spend more time assisting wholesale customers with non-routine inquiries.
- Freed up finance and purchasing staff to focus on strategic tasks.
- Began to evolve the bots to trigger tasks autonomously and leverage SAP Leonardo AI Business Services such as Document Classification and Document Information Extraction for automation of more complex tasks.
In Numbers
~10 Digital assistants, carrying out simple automated tasks in accounts, purchasing, and customer services.
6,000 Documents checked, classified, and processed each year using one AI bot.
