Explore Orbico’s journey with SAP
Orbico Group Ltd. is one of Europe’s leading fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) distributors. With a diverse brand portfolio, it recognized that agility is key to growth. It automated processes to boost efficiency, adapt to market trends, and unify its regional business units. It used SAP solutions to increase process automation and digitalization.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Consumer products | Central and Southern Europe | 8,000 employees |
hours of work saved each month.
bots deployed within 12 months.
IT Business Solution Director, Orbico Group Ltd.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Consumer products | Central and Southern Europe | 8,000 employees |
hours of work saved each month.
bots deployed within 12 months.
IT Business Solution Director, Orbico Group Ltd.
Future-proofing the IT landscape to meet new requirements
Founded in 1987, Orbico Group Ltd. boasts a roster of more than 500 brands offering goods like beauty care products, food and nonfood products, technical and electrical appliances, pharmaceuticals, toys, textiles, cigarettes, and motor oil products. With over 8,000 employees in 20 regional clusters across Europe, it strives to deliver operational excellence in supply chain management to multinational chains, wholesales stores, independent local traders, and specialized sales channels.
In recent years, the industry has seen a shift from traditional trade models to omnichannel models and indirect sales channels through digital platforms and e-commerce. Consistent customer experiences across many channels, optimized logistics processes, efficient inventory management, and the need to support indirect e-commerce channels to reach a wider audience called for increased digitalization, integration, and automation.
A key challenge in Orbico’s journey to enterprise automation was its fragmented, inefficiently integrated IT landscape. Local or customer-specific requirements, rapid growth, and multiple acquisitions created disparate systems, siloed processes, and increasing challenges to its ability to rapidly respond to evolving business needs. The group understood the need for standardized technology solutions that could be reused across the group and used as a foundation for its enterprise automation strategy.
SAP Maintenance Team Leader, Orbico Group Ltd.
Driving enterprise automation with standardization and flexibility
The primary goal of Orbico’s digital transformation journey was to digitalize its business processes to meet changing market requirements while improving the efficiency of its operations. Having used SAP ERP Central Component since 2016, Orbico chose SAP solutions to standardize its IT landscape across its different regional units. While the first wave of migration to SAP S/4HANA was completed in 2022, the group wanted to continue implementation with the remaining countries in its portfolio. With this migration project, Orbico plans to standardize, digitalize, and automate its core business processes across its units. It believed SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) could deliver additional capabilities that would support its strategy, including integration and process automation, data management, reporting, and analytics. The platform would give Orbico the flexibility it needed to quickly adapt to changing market requirements.
While Orbico prizes standardization, it knew flexibility was a key factor for a successful business strategy in a modern market. To address country, team, or customer-specific process and task automation opportunities, Orbico’s IT team decided to use the SAP Build Process Automation solution. The solution integrates smoothly with existing systems and processes, and its low-code capabilities and the availability of built-in process content, bot automations, and application templates could help the group achieve shorter project times, which would help it reduce costs and manual labor.
The IT team was specifically intrigued by the extensive documentation and online training material available, which would help it get up to speed and address specific requests more efficiently. The group understood that finance and controlling, sales and distribution, and reporting were the areas with the most potential for process automation. As such, it wanted to give business users from all group units the opportunity to propose automation use cases in their respective areas. A team of four in the IT organization would then evaluate the use cases for benefits and effort required and implement them alongside their other duties. With this fusion team model, the group would be able to quickly identify and realize several use cases, including the automatic creation of material and customer master data, automatic creation of documents in SAP solutions, and automated generation of reports that could be immediately sent to defined recipients.
SAP Maintenance Team Leader, Orbico Group Ltd.
Improving workflows with automation across the business
Within the first 12 months of transitioning, Orbico’s IT team created more than 40 process automation projects to support specific business requirements. To simplify invoice processing, it built a bot automation to transfer data from PDFs into SAP S/4HANA. This monitors a dedicated e-mail inbox, extracts the invoice data from PDF attachments into structured files, and uses the data to populate invoice documents in SAP S/4HANA. The bot recognizes invoice templates from 20 different vendors. The IT team is especially happy with how much easier it was to add additional templates as they rolled out the automation across the group. Currently, the automation processes 450 invoices per month, saving the finance team 30 hours of manual effort and reducing the error rate to zero.
Keeping track of expiry dates across warehouses can be a time-consuming process. The freshness report automation accesses a Microsoft Power BI report Web page, selects the required options, and downloads prefiltered reports for each product category into separate files that are then sent to predefined users for processing. Before the automation, a team of nine would spend 80 minutes twice a week on completing this mundane task.
The accounting team identified unsettled corporate card transactions as an opportunity for efficiency improvement. Now, a bot logs in to its SAP solutions to download the report file with unsettled transactions, filters the file, saves a separate file for each user, and sends a reminder e-mail to the relevant card holders. The time saving of four hours per month may seem small, but it is an activity with very little added value that the accounting team could completely automate, saving it precious time.
Orbico’s customers see impact through faster, more accurate, and personalized services. Employee benefits include less time spent on mundane tasks, better transparency, and faster issue resolution. Orbico has seen a marked increase in productivity, with 270 hours of labor freed up each month. The low-code capabilities allowed the company to automate processes that would be too uneconomical to upgrade through standard coding. This has saved the group precious time and money and has expanded the capability for continual process improvement across its enterprise. Beyond the direct benefits of SAP Build Process Automation, the close collaboration between business users and the IT team helped Orbico identify an additional 10 processes that could be optimized in different ways, resulting in another 70 hours saved every month.
Driving enterprise automation with low-code solutions
Given the ease of use of SAP Build Process Automation, the benefits of combining SAP solutions and third-party applications, and short implementation times for new automations, Orbico and its business users continue to drive automation initiatives. By combining SAP solutions with Web-based software and Microsoft applications, the group is able to improve processes with enhanced agility. Building on the positive outcomes with low-code automation and fusion team development, Orbico is exploring how SAP Build Work Zone can simplify how business users get access to and share the information they need to run better.