How an automotive manufacturer saves 3K hours and improves on-time delivery with parts order automation

Miller Industries is the world's largest manufacturer and distributor of vehicle towing and recovery equipment, serving over 60 countries. The company provides equipment to assist when your car breaks down on the roadside and to keep roadways clear after accidents.

With a large global distribution network, each customer maintains a different inventory of products using different systems, so each parts order sent to Miller Industries by email arrives in a different format—and sometimes even handwritten. 90% of parts orders come in through email, requiring Miller staff to constantly monitor email orders and manually enter them into Infor CloudSuite™ Automotive in a timely manner.

“It was challenging to find a solution to automate the creation of a parts order, with approximately 100 orders coming in daily through email in varying document layouts. Using templates with standard optical character recognition (OCR) was an inefficient and unreliable solution, forcing our business development managers to manually input orders throughout the day,” says Sias Reyneke, CIO of Miller Industries.

Executing orders fast and accurately is key to equipment uptime and customer satisfaction

Manual processing of parts orders often led to delays because it was error-prone and not executed in real time. Users had to periodically check for email orders throughout the day, which meant rush orders at the end of the day were not processed until the following day. Mistakes were also common, such as entering the wrong part or shipping information. This could result in the wrong part being sent, forcing the customer to start the order process all over again.

“Timing is everything because it means that a truck is down somewhere and needs a part to get back to operating,” says Reyneke. “That truck earns money for its owner, and the longer it sits idle, the more costly it becomes. Our goal is to get the parts order through the system fast so that the truck can get back on the road and make money for its owner.”

As part of Infor Velocity Suite, Infor Value+ Sales Order Creation solution automates the process using advanced technology. Using Infor Document Processor (IDP) and Infor GenAI, it extracts line-level details of the parts order and separates the “Sold To/Ship To” fields after IDP captures the text with OCR. Infor Robotic Process Automation (RPA) then orchestrates the entire process by automatically downloading the email order attachment, validating the extracted data with CloudSuite Automotive, and creating a new order in the system. Finally, the parts order document is uploaded automatically to Infor Document Management (IDM).

“I was impressed by how intelligently Infor’s automation for sales order creation interprets documents without needing specific mapping for each attribute name,” says Samir Dhond, Director of IT Business Systems at Miller Industries. “By creating well-designed prompts for the GenAI model, it gives accurate responses to RPA—even when attribute names and locations differ across customer PO documents.”

For instance, prompting GenAI with “Purchase Order Reference’ allows it to extract the correct value, whether the document labels it as “PO Number”, “Purchase Order”, “Our PO”, “Order #”, or “P. O. No”.

This seamless combination of advanced technologies is just one of many pre-built solutions in the Infor Value+ catalog. “We use the Infor Value+ Sales Order Creation so that our parts orders are processed reliably and in real time. As a result, Miller Industries can service customers better, and employees can redirect their time to more satisfying work,” says Dhond.

By leveraging the power of generative AI (GenAI), this solution fully automates spare parts order processing, saving thousands of hours annually and improving on-time delivery performance:

• 3,000+ hours of manual work saved annually
• 98% faster order execution
•  < 60 days to implement
• 100% more efficient document digitization

Online document management for fast search and retrieval further enhances customer satisfaction

Before implementing Infor Value+ Sales Order Creation, users mostly saved order documents on a shared drive instead of Infor Document Management (IDM). IDM made it faster and easier to search and retrieve documents—essential for addressing customer order inquiries—but manually entering attributes like order and customer numbers could still take several minutes. As a result, users preferred shared folders, even though retrieving documents later was time-consuming.

With the Infor Value+ Sales Order Creation, order documents are now automatically stored in IDM, with RPA entering data into the correct attribute fields. This solution has streamlined document management at Miller Industries, significantly improving the efficiency of handling parts order documents and expediting customer inquiries.

To learn more about Infor Velocity Suite, visit Infor Velocity Suite | Process Innovation Package