Orbico: Driving process efficiency with enterprise automation
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. Orbico used SAP solutions to increase process automation and digitalization.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Consumer products | Zagreb, Croatia | >9,700 employees |
bots deployed in three years.
hours of work saved each month.
bots in development, with estimated savings of 180 hours monthly.
IT Business Solution Director, Orbico Group Ltd.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Consumer products | Zagreb, Croatia | >9,700 employees |
bots deployed in three years.
hours of work saved each month.
bots in development, with estimated savings of 180 hours monthly.
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 9,700 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. Orbico understood the need for standardized technology solutions that could be reused groupwide and employed as a foundation for its enterprise automation strategy.
Group IT Business Solution Maintenance Team Leader SAP, Orbico Group Ltd.
Driving enterprise automation with standardization and flexibility
Orbico’s main goal in its business transformation journey was to digitalize processes to provide flexibility and resilience in support of ongoing business growth and future expansion, especially when integrating new businesses through mergers and acquisitions. It also wanted to quickly adapt to changing market requirements while improving efficiency and stability in its operations. Having used SAP ERP Central Component since 2016, it chose SAP solutions to harmonize its IT landscape across its regional units. The group migrated to SAP S/4HANA to standardize and digitalize its core business processes, completing the first wave in 2022. Since then, Orbico has aligned its strategy by implementing a unified ERP system, using a hybrid model that combines public and private cloud offerings from SAP.
Orbico’s ambition is to build an enterprise architecture to streamline common processes across its markets and to establish comprehensive core processes—initially in finance, procure-to-pay, and order-to-invoice—as critical in achieving efficiency, standardization, and automation throughout the group.
Orbico deployed SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) to deliver additional capabilities that would support its strategy, including integration and process automation, data management, reporting, and analytics. SAP Build solutions provided the company with low-code capabilities and prebuilt content to rapidly address country-, team-, or customer-specific process and task automation opportunities. The group is gradually replacing its legacy SAP Process Orchestration software with SAP Integration Suite. In addition, it employs the generative AI hub capability in the SAP AI Core infrastructure to enhance areas such as customer service efficiency. It also adopted a clean core approach to provide greater flexibility, accelerate upgrades, lower maintenance costs, and significantly reduce system rollout times across the other countries in which it does business.
Orbico initially identified finance and controlling, sales and distribution, and reporting as areas ripe for process automation. Using a fusion team model, these functions proposed use cases to the IT team, who evaluated the requests for benefits and effort before implementing them. With process automation well underway, business teams now provide functional requirements as well as business rationales and quantified benefits with each request, speeding up idea validation. And citizen developers can reuse templates and components created by the IT team in their projects, such as standardized components for SAP logins, logging, or data handling. Orbico designed mechanisms for documentation, monitoring, and governance of bots across its landscape. This allows it to manage lifecycles and security at scale, helping ensure that automation remains robust and sustainable as the group grows.
Group IT Business Solution Maintenance Team Leader SAP, Orbico Group Ltd.
Improving workflows with automation across the business
Over the past three years, Orbico has created 110 robots internally, saving 1,300 hours of labor each month. Automation has delivered clear benefits in cost, speed, and quality. Automating repetitive, rule-based tasks has reduced operational costs and freed up employees to concentrate on higher-value tasks that contribute to business growth.
Many processes run at night when systems are less busy, enabling faster performance during working hours and better system stability. Bots run 24x7, with approximately 600 process triggers per day, completing work at a pace that people would struggle to achieve. If designed well, a bot introduces zero errors, virtually eliminating manual data-entry mistakes and helping ensure consistent data quality and accuracy. Thanks to low-code capabilities, implementation time has gone from days—or even weeks—of traditional development to hours. Based on SAP’s learning resources, employees with about 20 hours of self-training can create their first bots. All these factors contribute to increased efficiency and productivity at Orbico. Plus, additional automations can be deployed quickly to meet new requirements, delivering scalability, flexibility, and agility as its business needs evolve.
While the automation projects started with SAP-related scenarios, such as simplifying invoice processing in SAP S/4HANA, Orbico’s bots now work across multiple applications and technologies. This includes document processing, data management, data aggregation and validation, and report and letter generation. Jurij Petruna, IT business solution director at Orbico Group Ltd., explains, “This demonstrates the versatility of our bots and their role in connecting disparate systems and reducing manual workload across functions.” The most significant impact has been in finance (28 bots), sales (36 bots), supply chain (31 bots), and master data management (5 bots). Each function developed a portfolio of automations that save time while improving reporting quality, compliance, and the user experience.
Finance has taken center stage in Orbico’s automation journey, with processes such as invoice posting, reconciliations, and settlements well-suited to automation. The company is employing optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities in the embedded edition of SAP Document AI with SAP Build. This allows it to use a bot to automatically extract invoice data from over 60 vendor templates and post it to SAP S/4HANA. With around 550 invoices processed monthly, this saves 30 hours of manual effort and reduces posting errors. In car leasing, users previously spent one to two days entering 180 to 200 leasing-invoice items per cycle. Now, the automation retrieves data from Microsoft SharePoint, validates it, builds a data set, and posts it directly to SAP S/4HANA. This takes approximately one hour, saving 14 to 30 hours monthly and helping ensure error-free entries with audit traceability.
Roughly 6,000 sales orders per month are now created automatically from manual sources such as e-mails, helping manage the large volume of orders and reports in sales processes. This spares about 100 hours monthly and allows sales staff to focus on value-adding tasks like customer engagement. Amidst complex supply chain operations and logistics, automations enable documented proof of delivery from multiple couriers (a legal requirement). Bots now perform tasks that were once one done manually, such as gathering confirmations through APIs, websites, or PDFs, depending on a courier’s setup. This reduces error-prone manual collection and saves 60 hours monthly.
Keeping track of expiry dates across warehouses can be a time-consuming process. Orbico’s freshness report automates expiry-date monitoring across warehouses by fetching prefiltered Microsoft Power BI reports and distributing them per product category. Before the automation, a team of nine would spend 90 minutes twice a week on completing this mundane task. Now, Orbico can save the equivalent of 12 staff hours every month while improving the accuracy and timeliness of critical operational data.
Automations produce material masters and business partner records directly from Microsoft Excel–based uploads, helping ensure standardized data with fewer errors. What previously required multiple teams and checks is now handled by bots in minutes. An example of a smaller automation, which won first place in Orbico’s “Best Idea” program, is a bot that helps its HR team handle candidate data, saving some 50 hours each month.
To reflect agentic process automation as the next step in its journey, Orbico’s IT team built an AI agent with the generative AI hub and the SAP Cloud Application Programming Model. Its customer service department uses the AI agent to respond automatically to customer e-mails, which it can now do within five minutes, down from a previous average of 4.5 hours. This frees up about 100 hours per month and significantly improves customer satisfaction.
IT Business Solution Director, Orbico Group Ltd.
Driving enterprise automation with low-code solutions
Looking to the future, Orbico is committed to its clean core strategy as well as extending its use of SAP Build solutions and other offerings on SAP BTP. The company sees these tools as critical because they combine tight integration with SAP systems and the agility necessary for dynamic business processes. The group’s ultimate goal is a more-harmonized, flexible, and innovation-ready IT landscape that supports business growth across its markets.