Fendahl unlocks new levels of productivity and efficiency with Azure OpenAI

Embracing AI to enhance product intuitiveness  

Recognizing the game-changing potential of AI within its industry, Fendahl was determined to pioneer its adoption and harness its advantages early.  With user experience being a critical aspect of its offerings, Fendahl aimed to revolutionize the industry by making its products more intuitive. Additionally, processes such as data reconciliation involved tedious manual methods. Fendahl wanted to streamline these processes and make them intelligent.

The company  chose to leverage  Azure OpenAI Service  to fulfil its requirements. Shrirang Pendharkar, Technical Director, Fendahl, explains, “We, at Fendahl, extensively use Microsoft products. The development framework for Fusion is based on Microsoft technologies. Additionally, Fusion is a SaaS-based solution hosted on Microsoft Azure. When Azure OpenAI Service became available, we saw it as a natural fit for our needs.”

Azure OpenAI Service was compatible with Fendahl’s technical ecosystem and therefore, the company readily leveraged it to implement AI applications and enrich its offerings.

Gaining efficiency, higher productivity, and an enhanced user experience

The initial stage of Fendahl’s AI journey was fraught with challenges. However, with FastTrack for Azure, the technical enablement program from Microsoft, the journey from design to deployment became smooth. Collaborating closely, the teams from Fendahl and Microsoft successfully deployed two business use cases in under two months: 

Natural language reporting: This innovative feature enables users to interact with Fusion. Users use natural language to query the database. These queries are converted into SQL queries using Azure OpenAI Service, and then executed to generate relevant reports. 

Document intelligence: This feature enables Fusion to intelligently read, extract, and process data from structured and unstructured documents. This functionality allows for automated data extraction and processing.

These AI-powered features have resulted in substantial benefits for Fendahl and its clients:

• The support for natural language queries has empowered users to generate reports independently. They no longer need to limit themselves to predefined queries but can extract information and generate reports to fulfill their specific requirements. Report generation is now far simpler and takes  significantly less time than the erstwhile manual report generation.
• The reduction in the number of requests for report generation and SQL queries allows the technical team and client based super users to focus on mission-critical tasks, enabling greater efficiency.
• Implementing existing role-based access control and data security groups has ensured the highest levels of data security and privacy.
• The document intelligence feature facilitates automated data entry, processing, and reconciliation, resulting in a 50% improvement in productivity for users engaged in these tasks.

Continuing the AI journey for further innovation

Henry Thornalley, Marketing Director, Fendahl, says, “The successful integration of natural language reporting and document intelligence in our product has resulted in the discovery of more business use cases where AI can be implemented. We are looking to leverage AI capabilities in voyage optimization and marketing initiatives. Another area that we are exploring is the implementation of an intelligent system that will quickly find the relevant information from our database and documents and generate high-quality, customized content that can be used for responses to RFPs.”

With its commitment to innovation, Fendahl is now looking forward to embracing new AI-driven opportunities and delivering greater value to internal and external stakeholders.