With almost 50 years of "competence in precision and quality", the company RUKO Präzisionswerkzeuge has developed into one of the world's leading manufacturers of drilling and countersinking tools. The key driver of success is the innovative orientation of the company. With their own production in Germany, they succeed again and again in bringing innovative products to the market. This future-oriented approach is also reflected in the order entry system, which RUKO successfully modernized with Workist in 2021.
The international success, however, also poses challenges for RUKO. With 11,200 articles in the range, customers from over 70 countries and orders that are sometimes 50 pages long, order entry is particularly time-consuming. In the EU alone, RUKO sends 300-400 packages a day by air and sea freight.
Order documents are also received in a wide variety of layouts, languages and time zones. For documents that do not originate from Germany, the VAT number must also be checked against the EU database, which places an additional burden on the internal sales team.
"By using Workist, we were able to simplify the otherwise time-consuming order entry process to such an extent that we saved 61 days of administrative work in just one quarter."
Team Leader Internal Sales & Head of Customer Service
Carmela di Cicco, Team Leader Internal Sales & Head of Customer Service at RUKO, became aware of Workist through Contorion in 2021. The tool retailer was already using the AI software successfully and was able to achieve significant efficiency gains. Therefore, without further ado, RUKO also decided to use the automation solution.
"We no longer wanted to spend hours mindlessly entering orders. With Workist, we have the opportunity to invest much of that time in customer sales, customer support, and the creation of quotations.” erklärt Carmela di Cicco.
One of the decisive factors for the introduction of Workist was the intelligent interpretation of order documents. This is because, unlike template-based approaches, for example, Workist's artificial intelligence understands orders regardless of the layout or language of the document. In addition, captured data points are validated using the master data before being transferred to the ERP system. "This simply makes Workist much more flexible and intelligent than other solutions." Carmela di Cicco confirms.
Right at the start, a VAT matching was also developed in close consultation, via which read-out VAT numbers are automatically compared with the EU database. In this way, Workist was able to guarantee the greatest possible time savings for RUKO and further relieve the sales department.
"Workist has easily met all the challenges of a large, international customer base and has even been able to solve the hurdle of VAT matching."
By using Workist, RUKO has not only made the sales department ready for the future, but has also been able to speed up order entry many times over. Whereas without Workist 70 full working days were still required for the manual entry of a quarter, with AI only 9 days were needed for the same process. This resulted in a time saving of 87%.
Recommendation by RUKO
The achieved successes eventually also led RUKO to make a recommendation. As a result, EXACT Präzisionswerkzeuge has also been using Workist's automated order entry for about a year now.
As a reliable partner for retail, RUKO supplies customers worldwide with high-quality twist drills, taps, core drills and countersinks, among other products, from the company headquarters in Holzgerlingen (southwest of Stuttgart). Since 1974, RUKO has specialized in providing professional users with the highest quality, fastest and most stable tools. The company now employs over 250 people and stocks around 11,200 items in its range.
Tools
Order entry