Diab is a global plastics company that is a world leader in its field. The company has many locations around the world, and in Laholm, they are just around the corner from our Swedish office. Here, Diab has a factory, a sales office, and a number of other business functions. They employ 220 people at this site, which makes Diab the largest private employer in Laholm.
Their Laholm office is just one of Diab's offices around the world, through which Diab combines global manufacturing, sales and engineering presence with local know-how. The Laholm factory produces core materials for sandwich composites. If you’re wondering what on earth that means (which was exactly what we were thinking when we started working with Diab!), it is simply that they process and ‘sandwich’ different types of plastic materials together. The end-product is a rigid and durable material that is mainly used in the wind-power energy sector.
As a manufacturing company, Diab’s sales staff receive purchase orders every day via email from their customers. When they started working with a new customer in 2019, the number of incoming orders increased heavily and as a result, they began considering automating their order management.
Christian Karlsson, Sales Manager at Diab:
Even before we got our new customer, we spent a huge amount of time processing orders manually. There was always a risk of entering the wrong information, which could lead to the customer getting an incorrect price or the wrong material. Then, when this large deal went through, we realized we had to do something about it.
After hearing about our product Bäck AI (seems to be the talk of the town here in Laholm!) Diab turned to Meta Bytes to discuss how we could help find them a solution.
After a good meeting, we soon realized that this was a good way to proceed. We wanted to automate.
Since Bäck AI was integrated into other internal business systems, the order processing at Diab has become much faster. The company has gone from inputting all orders manually before painstakingly double-checking the item number, price and quantity, to performing a single sense check of each order by comparing it with the order confirmation. Diab’s sales staff, who previously spent much of their time on order management, can now instead focus on other customer-related tasks such as additional sales, proposals and customer service. This not only contributes to increased customer satisfaction but also increased motivation throughout the workforce.
The time savings are something that have become apparent to Diab since the implementation of Bäck. However, Christian Karlsson also wants to emphasize the importance of reducing the risk of incorrect entries:
The main benefit for us is avoiding typos when registering an order. If incorrect information is entered and the production gets started it can lead to the customer stopping production when the error is finally realised. Let’s just say that if this happens, small mistakes can become very expensive, very fast. With our new automated order processing we are able to almost totally eliminate this risk.
To summarize, the implementation of Bäck AI has meant the following for Diab:
Learn more about automation and its benefits.
Bäck AI is currently being used by Diab Sweden, and the process of expanding the technology to other sales offices in other countries has recently begun.
