Between contributions from the Federal Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Hubertus Heil, the legendary Steve Jobs and Zeiss Group CIO Carsten Trapp, the H&F Solutions case study with customer Festo was published in the renowned CIO magazine. The case study clearly shows how the use of intelligent data interchange using dara® software has transformed the automation of document exchange at one of Festo’s pilot customers. Until now, the transfer of data for document exchange between companies has often been difficult, as it is frequently incomplete, incorrect and incorrectly structured.
Although most companies use the same ERP system, traditional EDI software has so far been unable to solve this problem adequately.

Long-term data flow solution

Intelligent solutions are therefore in demand. However, manufacturers and consultants for ERP systems still see no need to fundamentally improve the flow of data. They tie their customers very strongly to their system and benefit from corresponding data barriers. For users, this means expensive and lengthy investments with little scaling potential.

Philipp Futterknecht, CTO of H&F Solutions, explains the technical background: “Traditional EDI software focuses on reading information from the raw format and then pressing it into another format.
Our dara® product takes a smarter approach using Intelligent Data Interchange.
This means that instead of converting the data into a standard, we use semantic models, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to
documents from any format
individually into the desired form for the recipient . Our product is thereby Ongoing optimized” So it is of AI-based technology now even possible, Data from unstructuredn Receiptsn like the Portable Document Format (PDF) to process.

Futterknecht adds: “With dara® , users are not only able to automatically exchange data in the ERP system across company boundaries, but above all achieve a degree of automation of over 90%.” In simple terms, this means that intelligent data exchange fills data gaps, makes unstructured data available to the ERP system and identifies and corrects recurring errors.

The potential: 1,200 billion documents worldwide

Every year, 1,200 billion receipts are exchanged worldwide.
95% of these documents are currently processed manually.
In many cases, the workload per document averages 15 minutes.
This means that 500 automated documents correspond to approximately one person-month of a clerk.
The automation potential of IDI solutions is correspondingly high – and this for a problem that, thanks to ERP, should no longer exist.

Major advances in document processing

H&F Solutions customer Festo, a leading global supplier of intelligent production systems, has made remarkable progress in document exchange by using the IDI solution dara® as part of a pilot project. Previously, 70% of documents had to be reworked manually, which was not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. Thanks to the software from H&F Solutions, Festo was able to reduce this effort to just 10%. This corresponds to an impressive increase in automated document processing for a pilot customer from 30% to over 90%.

Intelligent data processing: the key to success

Intelligent data processing is at the heart of the technology. By using advanced processes such as machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), data gaps are closed, errors are automatically detected and corrected, and incoming documents are analyzed and processed in real time. This enables seamless integration into existing ERP systems. This minimizes manual intervention, significantly reduces the error rate, cuts costs and automates the exchange of documents between trading partners and their ERP systems.

A success story

Festo’s case study is a clear example of how dara® cloud technology not only increases efficiency, but also significantly improves the quality of data processing. This eliminates the need for complex, costly integration projects, enables increased scalability and ensures competitiveness for companies. This success story was made possible by mutual trust and working together as equals.