Order processing · Production

Suzano International automates purchase order processing with Nanonets AI-powered OCR

The problem

Suzano's European sales team manually keyed data from diverse purchase order templates spanning many end-customers — encompassing PDFs, emails, Excel sheets, and scanned documents — into SAP, making data-gathering and homogenisation the most time-consuming step in order fulfilment.

First attempt

Prior OCR solutions were evaluated but each was limited to a single document format, making them impractical for Suzano's wide variety of purchase order templates and document types.

Workflow diagram · grounded in source
1
Purchase order received
trigger
“End-customers create a Purchase Order which is shared with the sales teams at Suzano”
2
Ingest from Gmail or One Drive
integration
“Nanonets ingests the incoming Purchase Orders directly at the source, which is Gmail or One Drive. For all other document types, such as PDFs, Excel Spreadsheets, hard copies of Excel Spreadsheets or even screenshots, there is an option …”
3
AI OCR data extraction
ai_action
“The AI-powered custom OCR model at Nanonets extracts the relevant data points from the Purchase Orders, including relevant customer details, such as, name, shipping and billing address, along with a list of requested items, including, na…”
4
Post-processing and lookup mapping
ai_action
“This data then flows through a number of post-processing formatting steps such as finding and replacing characters, removing multiple instances of currency symbols, etc. to clean up the extracted data. We also create additional data poin…”
5
Human approval review
human_review
“There is an additional approval step in place that ensures all data points are extracted correctly with no oversight”
6
Export as Excel spreadsheet
output
“The clean, formatted data is then extracted as Excel Spreadsheets”
7
Automated SAP data entry
integration
“The team at Suzano utilises VBAs and Macros to automate data entry into SAP”
Reported outcome

The Nanonets solution handles all document formats and templates in a single automation, significantly reducing turnaround time and requiring minimal human intervention for data entry.

Reported metrics
Order processing turnaround timesignificantly reducing the turnaround time
Human intervention for data entryminimal human intervention from the team for data entry
separate automations required with single-format OCR competitorsmore than 200
Reported stack
NanonetsSAPGmailOne DriveOCRVBAsMacros
Source
https://nanonets.com/customer-success-story/suzano-international-automates-purchase-order-processing-with-nanonets
Read source ↗

Frequently asked questions

What did this team achieve with this AI workflow?

The Nanonets solution handles all document formats and templates in a single automation, significantly reducing turnaround time and requiring minimal human intervention for data entry.

What tools did this team use?

Nanonets, SAP, Gmail, One Drive, OCR, VBAs, Macros.

What results were reported?

Order processing turnaround time: significantly reducing the turnaround time; Human intervention for data entry: minimal human intervention from the team for data entry; separate automations required with single-format OCR competitors: more than 200 (source-reported, not independently verified).

What failed first in this deployment?

Prior OCR solutions were evaluated but each was limited to a single document format, making them impractical for Suzano's wide variety of purchase order templates and document types.

How is this order processing AI workflow structured?

Purchase order received → Ingest from Gmail or One Drive → AI OCR data extraction → Post-processing and lookup mapping → Human approval review → Export as Excel spreadsheet → Automated SAP data entry.

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