RIX North America Drives Business Agility with Data Integration and Automation

20-step workflow processes and siloed data sets prevented RIX from responding to customers faster, so it looked to HULFT.

RIX North America is a subsidiary of RIX Corporation, a 110-year-old global trading company of production goods. RIX North America began operations in 2016 and is the North American trading division that provides high-performance industrial equipment to the auto, steel, machinery, semiconductor, and rubber/tile industries. Their customers include major global manufacturers that demand speed and efficiencies across their entire supply chain ecosystem.

A great problem to have: Too many customer requests and order fulfillments

RIX North America aligns itself with its parent company’s core identity of being a “customer-oriented trading company.” Taka Fujinaka, president of RIX North America, is building a North American team that holds themselves to the highest standard of customer relationships.

“My goal isn’t to add more headcount. What’s most important to us is trust and speed – a small but nimble team who knows what it takes to establish strong relationships with customers and can respond to their needs quickly,” said Fujinaka-san.

This approach is paying off. Within four years, RIX North America increased its revenue by five times. But success also uncovered back-office inefficiencies: With the growing influx of quote requests, purchase order fulfillments, as well as other customer inquiries, RIX North America realized that its original 20-step manual workflow and 200 email exchanges centered around repetitive data entries from Google sheets to QuickBooks and vice versa was the company’s biggest roadblock to scaling as a global company. 

“Significant time and human effort were going into processes that were sequential and repetitive in nature,” said Fujinaka-san. “I want my team focused on 1:1 customer interaction and these tasks were taking precious time away from that.”

Digitizing PDFs with HULFT Data Capture saves RIX 160 hours a month in manual work

The RIX North American team worked with HULFT to develop a multi-phased integration and automation strategy that incorporates HULFT Data Capture, HULFT Integrate, as well as professional services.

RIX first tackled its most immediate issue – streamlining two primary workflows that were burdening the team: responding to customer quote requests and delivering final orders. First, the team needed to eliminate the manual data entries of manufacturing parts into excel and google sheets. The data would often need to be entered and re-entered in separate files as many as three times.

HULFT Data Capture, which leverages OCR scanning within an intuitive interface, enabled the RIX sales team to scan a document with required fields captured digitally. With the right data now captured, the team then leveraged HULFT Integrate to further automate the creation of purchase orders and sales orders.

By removing the manual work associated with responding to customer quote requests and delivering final orders, the RIX sales and account teams is now saving about 160 hours a month.

“The time savings with digitizing manual work instantly allowed us to reinvest employee time and backend administrative costs into more result-oriented customer interactions and improve employee productivity,” said Fujinaka-san.

Deeper enterprise integration to streamline workflows with HULFT Integrate

Next, the two teams designed an enterprise integration plan. RIX North America had two critical goals – continue to scale in North America and build greater transparencies and access between them, RIX Japan HQ, and other regional offices. This project (which is currently still in process) will involve:

• The creation of a data management platform that can track current sales operations processes, price quotes, customer orders, and purchase orders will be accessible to both the North American and Japan teams.
• The migration, consolidation, and synchronization of data across Google sheets, Excel, and Quickbooks through HULFT Integrate adapters.
• The foundation for tighter application integration across regional offices. By leveraging HULFT Integrate’s pre-built adapters, RIX’s regional teams will be able to share and connect data quickly, even if different sales and accounting applications are used by each office.

“After the first phase of our project was complete, we had a chance to explore the capabilities of HULFT Integrate,” said Fujinaka-san. “There were different ways to address our problem, and we were originally considering a CRM. But implementing a CRM would require a change to our workflows, necessitating additional time and resources.”

Fujinaka-san continues, “RIX is paving a new course of action that fuses digital and analog. HULFT Integrate and HULFT Data Capture reinforce the digital aspects of our business, which means our team can focus on the analog, in-person relationships.”

“HULFT Integrate provides a flexible architecture where we simply use an adapter to connect to different systems and applications. It is intuitive and fits right into our workflows, not the other way around. Our partnership with HULFT enables us to connect our sales and accounting data for a single pane of truth. We are positioning ourselves for growth and HULFT is one of our competitive advantages.”

About HULFT Data Capture and HULFT Integrate

HULFT Data Capture accelerates the capture, extraction, and validation of meaningful data through a streamlined and straightforward user-interface platform that gives users full control over the level of data verification and automation they require. This offering complements the breadth and depth of HULFT Integrate, a no-code data integration architecture that is securely compatible with all major data destinations through hundreds of diverse adapters. Combined, HULFT Integrate and HULFT Data Capture can work together in taking actionable data and delivering it further into a business application, intelligence tool, or workflow.

HULFT Data Capture is typically integrated into a workflow as part of a broader business integration process or RPA solution. Most data extraction tools require significant manual interaction such as uploading the file, waiting for results, downloading the data, and then manipulating it to the right format. HULFT offers a one-stop-shop by providing data capture, plus the ability to connect that data to any internal or external database directly.