Levelling up SAP at i-PRO Americas: How 70% of customer orders are now automatic

Right now, an i-PRO camera is watching a train platform fill up, and another is recording a traffic stop that will be reviewed in court. Every one of those cameras was built to order, and until recently, that meant somebody had to type that order into SAP before the production line could touch it.

At i-PRO Americas, orders typically run to 100 line items, and each one used to be keyed in by hand. As the business grew, orders started arriving faster than any team could process them. But rather than adding headcount to a task that a person didn’t need to be doing, i-PRO went looking for a way to automate as much of the workflow as they could. Today, around 70% of those orders never touch a keyboard.

We sat down with Ali Haroon, Director of Corporate Strategy, Digital Transformation, and IT & Cybersecurity at i-PRO, and Rohan Ponnekanti, Manager of Business Systems and Head of Americas SAP IT, to hear how they did it.

i-PRO builds to order rather than to stock, which means very little sits on a shelf waiting for a buyer. A hospital ordering camera-equipped surgical instruments and a transit authority ordering platform cameras get products configured for them, and the build starts once the order lands. That model keeps inventory costs down and puts a lot of weight on how fast an order moves from the customer into production.

The technology itself sits at the more demanding end of the market. i-PRO puts edge AI directly into its cameras so analysis happens on the device, and it treats data integrity as a design requirement rather than a feature, which matters immensely when footage ends up as evidence.

i-PRO at a glance

• Established as i-PRO in 2019, built on more than 60 years of Panasonic security technology heritage
• Operations in 72 countries
• Advanced video technology across security, public safety and medical vision
• Edge AI capabilities built into its cameras, with a strong focus on data integrity

Documents follow an i-PRO product from the first sketch to the final invoice. On the R&D side, engineers design products and produce the specifications that define how each one gets built. On the fulfillment side, the business takes in purchase orders, ships against them and sends invoices out. In between sits the paperwork that comes with running a manufacturer operating in 72 countries, including new customer forms, vendor agreements, contracts and the NDAs i-PRO executes with partners and prospects. Most of it arrives from outside the business, in whatever format the sender chose, and all of it has to end up somewhere retrievable.

Audit season makes the stakes plain. A document that can't be produced on request is a finding, and for a company preparing for an IPO the bar sits higher again. As Ali puts it, i-PRO needs "that chain of custody, having the documents archived and accessible and being able to get to them when needed."

i-PRO's customers typically order between 50 and 100 line items at a time. Every one of those lines had to be read off the customer's order and keyed into SAP by a person, and the queue built up faster than the team could work through it.

Rohan Ponnekanti, Manager of Business Systems and Head of Americas SAP IT, saw what that did to the customer service team. "Previously, our customer service team used to spend most of their time doing manual entry with the orders, and this was impacting our business with orders not getting processed on the same day," he says. "It would take at least four to five days to just cover the backlog."

For a company that builds to order and holds as little inventory as possible, that delay lands straight on the customer. Ali is blunt about what i-PRO could promise at the time. "We could barely commit that we would even get the order into SAP the same day and maybe ship it within the same week."

i-PRO digitized its customer order processing with Doxis Order-to-Cash for SAP. It's software that works on orders directly in SAP, and it comes in three modules covering orders, billing and archiving.

For i-PRO, the order module and the archive module were the ones that mattered. The order module reads incoming customer orders however they arrive, whether by email, PDF, EDI or SAP Ariba, checks the data against what's already in SAP and creates the sales order automatically.

As for the archive module, it replaced the legacy system i-PRO had outgrown. The company's business-critical documents in SAP, including customer orders and everything subject to retention rules, used to sit in an SAP Content Repository that was no longer officially maintained, which meant IT propping it up by hand through every test and system change.

Since adopting Doxis, the business team has reported no archiving failures, no missing documents, and no disruption to the order process. Those documents now sit within i-PRO's own IT infrastructure, with access and backups managed internally, giving the company tighter control for audit requirements and IPO preparations.

So, when a customer order lands:

• Doxis reads it and works out what's on it
• It pulls the line items and matches them against i-PRO's master data in SAP
• It creates the order in SAP automatically
• The rep reviews what came through and confirms it
• The document goes into the archive, stored and searchable, so it's there when auditors ask

Around 70% of i-PRO's customer orders now go through automatically, and the ones that do are handled the same day they arrive. Rohan puts the improvement in operational efficiency down to that shift, and weekly order volume is, in his words, "tremendously high compared to how things were a few years ago."

That gave i-PRO something new to offer its customers. "If you were to get our order in by a certain time, we can ship it the same day," Ali says. For a manufacturer that builds product as it sells rather than stockpiling it, order entry sets the pace for everything downstream, so getting it moving in seconds rather than days changes what the whole operation can commit to.

The customer service team's role changed with it. Instead of keying in line items, they now review what the system has picked up and confirm it before the order is created, which puts experienced people on judgment rather than data entry.

i-PRO Americas’ achievements at a glance:

• 70% of orders handled automatically
• 90 to 95% success rate on automated order creation
• Same-day shipping on orders received by a set time
• Weekly order volume well up on a few years ago
• Around $348,000 in expected savings over three to four years

i-PRO's order process worked for years. It only became a problem when volumes climbed past what a team of people could type in a day, and by then the cost was landing on customers waiting a week for a product sitting finished in the building.

The question i-PRO asked was whether reading an order and typing it into SAP needed a person at all. Once AI could do the reading, the answer was no. The archive turned out the same way, working well enough that nobody questioned it until IT was propping it up by hand.

Every manufacturer has processes like these. The ones that pull ahead will go looking for them while their competitors are still typing.