About Bruzaholms Bruk
AB Bruzaholms Bruk is one of Sweden’s oldest industrial companies. In 1660, sheriff Nils Pädhersson was granted permission to build a forging workshop on the Brusa river. Since the 1950s the focus has been wear- and heat-resistant castings, and since 1991 the works has been part of the privately held Cellwood Group. Today around 65 people from 17 nationalities work in Bruzaholm.
The products sit where wear is at its worst. Wear parts in the in-house BZ95™ alloy, at 650 HB hardness, go to Europe’s leading makers of asphalt and concrete mixers. Heat-resistant grate bars and plates in chromium-based alloys withstand up to 1,150 °C in biofuel and waste incineration plants. Castings also go to mining, crushing and cement.
It is a business where the customer counts on the part being there while production stands still. Bruzaholms measures its delivery precision, OTIF, at 98.3 percent over a twelve-month period. That figure rests on everything that happens before the delivery — including the admin.
The challenge
Orders arrive in every shape: email in several languages, recurring call-offs on wear parts, lead-time enquiries in the middle of a customer’s production stop. Every order has to be interpreted, matched to the right item and alloy, registered in Monitor ERP and confirmed to the customer. Then it has to be watched all the way to delivery.
The work is not hard. It is repetitive, always running and impossible to set aside — and it lands with the same people who are meant to carry the technical dialogue with customers. Under high load, holidays or absence, the queue of unconfirmed orders is the first thing to grow.
What Sussie does
- Incoming orders — reads orders and call-offs, interprets the content and matches it to the right item, alloy and customer agreement before registering it in Monitor ERP.
- Validation — checks price, quantity, delivery address and terms against agreements and order history, and stops at anything that deviates.
- Order confirmations — confirms the same day, with the right details and the right lead time, in the customer’s language.
- Customer questions — answers recurring questions about order status, lead times and back orders without anyone digging through the system.
- Follow-up — monitors open orders, spots what is at risk of slipping and flags it to the right person in time.
- Delivery updates — keeps the customer informed continuously, instead of the customer having to chase.
Why a digital coworker — not another system
Sussie is not another interface to log into. She works in the systems Bruzaholms already uses, following the same routines a new colleague would have been taught. Everything she does is logged and can be reviewed afterwards, and anything that calls for judgement is handed to a human.
For a company of this size, with no IT department in-house, that was decisive. No new platform to maintain, no migration and no rebuilding of how the work is actually done.
The effect
- Faster answers — orders are confirmed the same day, not when someone finds a gap.
- Consistent quality — the same checks every time, regardless of load or absence.
- Fewer interruptions — the sales team is not pulled away by status questions already answered.
- More time for customers — technical dialogue and business instead of order entry.
- Room to grow — more orders do not require more hours of admin.
Next steps
Order handling was the first step. The same approach can be applied to quotation replies, deviations on inbound deliveries and follow-up with freight partners — process by process, at the pace the business wants.