Pelangi Publishing Group is a regional educational publishing company that was founded in 1979 by a group of young teachers. They are based in Malaysia with local publishing offices in Thailand and Indonesia. Apart from producing educational materials covering the Malaysian curriculum, Pelangi also produces materials covering Thailand, Indonesia, and Singapore's curriculum. Their educational products range from kindergartens to pre-university levels. Every year, Pelangi produces more than 400 new publications in five different languages - English, Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese, Thai, and Bahasa Indonesia.
Pelangi’s Main Challenges
Below are a few challenges faced by Pelangi:
Inventory Management
1. The warehouse is full with inventory. There are more than 400 new publications per year over 40 years. This makes their business operations challenging.
2. The Variety of SKUs complicates Pelangi’s order processes in every way. Pelangi has large amounts of Subjects x Levels x Series x Versions, which makes it difficult to manage the warehouse storage and complicates how they locate and pick their inventory.
Order Processing Time
1. Pelangi is always time-pressed the few months before the new school year begins.
2. Because Pelangi is dealing with education, the order processing timeline is always short, increasing Pelangi’s pressure to deliver the stocks (books) to all the schools before the schools reopen.
Conventional Sales Channels
1. Pelangi’s sales channels cover big and small schools, rural and urban schools.
2. Many of Pelangi’s distributors still operate in a conventional way, therefore there is still lots of manual work involved.
Axrail’s Proposed Solutions
With a team who is AWS certified and experienced in AWS and consulting, Axrail has been serving clients ranging from startups to enterprise, covering multiple industries like retails, media, transportation and well-known service providers. With this being said, an industry like Education is not a difficult industry to deal with!
Axrail strongly believes that Education is a very important industry that needs digitalization so that our future generations are able to benefit from this! Pelangi then entrusted us with their problems, believing that we are able to help them get better in their operations!
Below are some proposed solutions:
Order Entry Automation
Since customers’ purchase orders come in different formats, Pelangi had to manually extract from customers’ Purchase Orders (PO) and convert them into their Business Portal.
Axrail came with the Textract solution. This saved a lot of manual work to key into their system, both in the Operation team and Sales team.
Here's how Textract works:
1. From the customer end, sales entry documents will be scanned via scanner.
2. The scanner will then trigger an email notification to Axrail where Textract will be used to extract information on the documents.
3. Information such as Customer PO, Customer ID, Customer Name, ISBN/Bookcode, Quantity and Sample are collected.
4. A CSV file will auto populate with the above information.
For most organizations today, the below picture is the normal daily sales activities, where customers will contact you and issue you a PO, and your operations team will manually input the PO into the existing ERP software like SAP or navision. This process is very time consuming and prone to many errors.
With Axrail Commerce (see picture below), our customer journey remains unchanged and PO will go into Axrail Commerce platform. We use Amazon AI to extract the relevant information and automate data input into the ERP software like SAP and navision.
In addition, Axrail also provides two more channels to accept orders, which is from WhatsApp and Online Product Catalog via our portal.
Happy Outcomes
We are extremely happy when our customers are happy! We love it when we can celebrate our customers’ success stories!
Below are some fantastic outcomes, which satisfied Pelangi Publishing Berhad.
Reduced manual processing time by 40%.
Reduced back end office manpower for more than 25% over the past 3 years.
Reduced wrong supply cases and customer complaints because of better accuracy.
Pelangi’s sales team can now be more focussed on sales activities, rather than manual data entry work when they receive customer orders.
With that, this is how we helped solve Pelangi's manual sales processing with AI technology.