Kloeckner case study: automating purchase order confirmation processing with GeneralMind
About Kloeckner
Kloeckner & Co is one of the world’s leading producer-independent distributors of steel and metal products, founded in 1906 and headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany. Through a network of around 140 locations in 13 countries, the Group supplies more than 100,000 customers and generated roughly €6.4bn in revenue in 2025 with about 6,500 employees.
Notably, Kloeckner is widely recognized as a pioneer of digital transformation in the traditionally analog steel industry, repositioning itself from a pure distributor into a data-driven, platform-based business. This makes operational efficiency and automation a strategic priority across the Group.
Use-case definition
The focus is clearly Purchase Order Confirmation Processing: handling supplier-side order confirmations that arrive in many different forms, formats, and file types. These confirmations can be delayed and sometimes contain contradictory information. GeneralMind reads, structures, and processes them reliably despite this variability.
The challenge
Within operational procurement, a single team handles supplier communication, including purchase order confirmation processing, largely by hand. As volumes grow steadily, this team needs to become faster and more efficient while making fewer errors.
Three pressures compound the problem:
Legacy systems
Constant manual switching between a legacy ERP, Outlook, and spreadsheets — everything updated by hand.
An aging team
Absences strain capacity, and as experienced people leave, hard-won process knowledge walks out the door.
Rising volume
Communication load keeps climbing, pushing up both effort and cost.
The result is a technological barrier that makes a high-volume, manual process slow, error-prone, and fragile.
The solution
Together with GeneralMind, Kloeckner is building a technology layer that sits on top of the existing systems rather than replacing them. It integrates with the current landscape and drastically accelerates the processing of these transactions, automating large parts of the workflow end to end.
Employees stay in the loop where it matters:
AI proposes
Reads & structures each confirmation
Human reviews
Staff adjust or refine where needed
Auto-executes
Acts where confident · all logged
Humans stay in control of the judgment calls, while the manual, repetitive work the legacy setup demanded goes away.
Results / Impact
Quantitative wins:
Qualitative wins:
“GeneralMind automates non-trivial & complex workflows across Kloeckner’s supply-chain that were previously handled manually. We are grateful for their partnership and impressed by the speed GeneralMind moved and the value their solutions deliver.”
