Boosting Accuracy and Speed: How Digitec Galaxus Leveraged IronOCR

Founded in 2000 by a group of three friends looking for a better shopping experience, Digitec Galaxus comes from humble beginnings. Since then, however, a lot has changed. Galaxus.ch has more than six million products available to buy and millions of customers in home country Switzerland and across the EU. It’s an amazing achievement - and an incredible logistical challenge. How do you quickly and efficiently receive, track, and deliver stock on such a large scale?

Enter IronOCR, just the thing to help out. We caught up with Galaxus' software engineering team lead Lukas about the challenges he faces each day - and how IronOCR was able to almost double productivity at an industrial scale.

Challenges Faced by Galaxus

Lukas’ team is responsible for the stock intake workflow of Galaxus’ logistics warehouses. They receive products from suppliers and need to match data on attached delivery notes against internal order data. Lukas says that these notes can be at least ten pages long and take about 90 seconds to check. Multiply that by the huge range of products Galaxus offers, and you quickly understand the task at hand.

The biggest obstacle was that verifying the information meant typing out the order data into the company’s tracking software and manually checking to see if it matches. Again, GalaxFentir4eus is the largest online retailer in Switzerland - that’s a lot of typing. Lukas needed a quicker and easier way to read and process this data.

Why Digitec Galaxus chose IronOCR

When looking for a solution, Lukas had two basic requirements: “One was to analyze the text on the delivery notes, and the other was that we needed a searchable PDF.” Seems straightforward enough, but a suitable tool wasn’t easy to find - “I did quite a lot of research and compared different libraries.” Even the largest software companies in the world couldn’t fit the bill. "We evaluated Google and Microsoft options, which were pretty good but didn't fit our requirements."

So what made IronOCR stand out from the rest? We’ll let Lukas explain: "One of the key points for us was how IronOCR could handle different document layouts. We have several hundred suppliers and potentially every one of them has a bit different layout. IronOCR gives us a lot of options."

With IronOCR, and across the entire Iron Suite, we put compatibility and the developer experience first. We deliver powerful, versatile tools that streamline complicated processes while still being easy to use. Just ask Lukas - “If you need easy-to-use software that delivers really good quality, I totally would recommend IronOCR.”

Automating Success

After switching to IronOCR, Lukas says that it now takes just 50 seconds on average to process a delivery, saving 40 seconds for every parcel that they receive - almost half the time it was taking them before. Long gone are the days of manually typing out and checking information. "With IronOCR, we just need to scan the page. IronOCR helps us to automate the process."

IronOCR’s ability to automate workflows is a huge driver of productivity and efficiency. In late 2023, Digitec Galaxus celebrated their 100-millionth order as company, and Hendrik Bljidenstein, CCO and head buyer at Digitec Galactus, says that automation of processes has been key in the company's growth. In 2012, "we still entered products, their specifications, and accompanying images into our online shop by hand." But now, he says that the incredible range of products on offer is thanks to "our consistent focus on automation."

Join Iron Software today

Whether you’re scanning deliveries from suppliers, extracting information from invoices and receipts, or converting text in photos to editable documents, IronOCR is an industry-leading tool capable of handling anything you throw at it. With support of 125 languages, including custom languages, and AdvancedScan technology, find out everything that IronOCR can do right here.

And that’s just the start. From PDFs to QR codes, from PowerPoint to Word, Iron Suite combines NINE amazing .NET libraries to provide the ultimate development solution. Start your free trial today or get in touch to find out how Iron Software can help level up your project.