Sappi Europe is using artificial intelligence and automation to simplify complex business processes, improve customer service and reduce repetitive administrative work. From HR onboarding and offboarding to shipping documentation and customer sentiment analysis, cross-functional teams are developing practical AI-enabled solutions that create business value while building internal digital capabilities.
Many of today’s business processes rely on coordination between multiple people, systems and teams. Whether onboarding a new employee, validating shipping documentation or analysing customer feedback, much of the work involves the repetitive exchange of information, tracking progress and following up on outstanding actions. These are essential activities, but they can be as time-consuming as they are repetitive – taking team members away from customer-focused work to spend precious time on awkward administration.
For a business as major and multinational as Sappi Europe, this has inevitably long been an ingrained aspect of day-to-day working. But not anymore.
Across the company, teams have come together to ideate, innovate and explore how artificial intelligence and automation can streamline such core repetitive processes – so as to support better decision-making and enhance the customer experience.
This has resulted in Sappi Europe developing its own AI- and automation-enabled business solutions, rather than purchasing fully packaged solutions. By combining digital platforms such as Google Gemini and UiPath with the workflows and system integrations unique to the company and its customers – and working hand-in-hand with Sappi’s European Centre of Process Excellence in Cracow – teams across the business have turned existing practice on its head and reinvigorated the customer service experience.
Three recent initiatives provide a snapshot of how technical expertise, hands-on knowledge and practical experimentation can be combined by willing teams to rewrite the operational playbook..
Initiative 1: Reimagining the employee pathway through onboarding and offboarding
HR plays a vital role in any organisation that is serious about looking after and bringing the best out of its employees. But when it comes to the likes of onboarding and offboarding, looking after employees can also trigger copious levels of necessary-but-repetitive form-filling, numerous email threads and time-consuming inter-personnel coordination. All with the added risk of delays or missteps along the way.
With this in mind, the HR team at Sappi’s European Centre of Process Excellence in Cracow proposed an HR onboarding and offboarding initiative in the form of an AI agent connected to a shared HR mailbox. The agent is designed to support employees and internal teams throughout key stages of the employee lifecycle by understanding incoming requests, extracting relevant information, identifying missing data and coordinating next steps through structured email communication.
So, when it comes to offboarding, the agent will be able to recognise when an employee or HR initiates a departure process and to create a uniquely identifiable case. It will then coordinate confirmations from the employee’s manager, IT, accounts payable and admin. At the same time the agent will track responses, follow up on missing confirmations, identify potential issues and flag out-of-office messages.
Then, once all required information has been collected, the agent will prepare a consolidated case summary for HR – with final approval and any decisions related to the employee’s departure remaining fully with the HR team themselves.
The same solution will support employee onboarding, with new employees able to contact the agent and get practical guidance during the first weeks of employment – on the likes of employee benefits, internal policies, administrative procedures and important contacts. Whenever appropriate, the agent will pass an enquiry on to a dedicated member of the HR team.
With possible applications across the Sappi Europe business, the new HR initiative isn’t designed to replace human HR judgement or the responsibilities of the participating teams. Rather it is being developed as a consistent coordination layer to help ensure that requests are recorded, responsibilities are clear and process information is available in one place.
Benefits, meanwhile, are expected to extend beyond direct time savings. By replacing physical forms and fragmented email follow-ups with a structured and traceable process, the initiative should improve process transparency and provide employees with quicker, clearer communication.
Initiative 2: Improving document reading to make shipping more reliable
Sappi already runs a document-checking assistant called Vistula to read PDFs from its shipping company. Vistula checks whether the data matches what is in SAP (weight, container numbers, booking references and so on) so that shipping instructions are accurate.
But the current system only works with the current shipping line and, when more instructions are added, documents have to be checked manually – so increasing the risk of human error. Such mistakes can be costly, with incorrect paperwork potentially resulting in demurrage (a charge for delayed unloading) and detention costs.
A further limitation comes with the fact that Vistula is ‘hardcoded’ – meaning it can only read data where it expects to find it on a PDF. Even a slight change in document layout may prevent the document-checking assistant from reading it correctly.
Taking these factors into consideration – and the risks to which they expose the wider business – a team at Sappi’s European Centre of Process Excellence in Cracow set out to rebuild Vistula so that it can read any document from any shipping line, regardless of formatting. Now, rather than following predetermined rules, Vistula 2.0 actively interprets a document’s content.
One quantifiable benefit has been the saving of approximately 40 hours a month of manual checking. Meanwhile, the elimination of human error in the handling of hundreds of booking confirmations has not only reduced the risk of demurrage (the extra fee paid when a shipment remains at a transit point longer than it is supposed to), but has also already benefitted Sappi customers by ensuring on-time delivery and collection of much-needed products.
Initiative 3: Analysing the customer sentiment in half a million emails
Across Europe, Sappi's customer service teams handle more than 500,000 customer emails a year in 17 different languages. Until recently, those emails have been assessed by a total of 105 different representatives – with no consolidated view across regions or business areas and no real way to analyse customer sentiment.
This has meant that the emotional tone of all these valuable customer messages – whether the customer’s attitude was positive, neutral or negative – has gone largely unevaluated and unexplored. Instead, customer service teams have had to rely on annual customer surveys to partially extract the kind of valuable feedback on customer sentiment that was already available in the emails – available but inaccessible.
What was needed was a way of using the huge volume of emails to assess – in real time – customer attitudes to the service they were receiving from the business right across Europe. What did customers appreciate? What did they dislike? What confused them? And how could Sappi do better?
To find out, specialists from Sales Operations, Sales Offices and Sappi's European Centre of Process Excellence in Cracow collaborated to build the company’s own sentiment engine: an AI tool that can understand the tonal composition of messages. Working from a base AI model that had already learned language patterns from large multilingual datasets, the team built a bespoke system to handle Sappi’s specific data flow and analytic requirements.
The result is an engine that evaluates customer sentiment and provides real-time insights by country, business area or customer.
Now Sappi sales teams can head to client meetings with the most immediate concerns of customers already in mind – and with Sappi services and solutions primed to help. At the same time, any developing customer service issues can be identified and addressed before they become entrenched problems.
For Sappi Europe customer relationship management, the sentiment engine has been a game changer.
AI demystified
There’s one more important aspect in which this and the other showcased AI-activation examples have changed the rules of the game.
Today, through close involvement in the development and deployment of these solutions, employees right across the business have a fuller understanding of how AI and automation work – and where a combination of the two can create genuine value.
And by designing, testing and refining solutions internally (rather than reaching for ready-made external solutions) teams are gaining first-hand experience of the strengths, limitations and practical applications of these technologies – so helping Sappi become a more informed and responsible user of AI.
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