Shopping reimagined

Service-Bund brings together more than 30 regional food wholesalers that provide their customers with individual digital ordering channels. Every day, customers — from small restaurants to hospitals and cruise ships — order goods via these shops. Service-Bund is continuously developing its digital ordering platform to make purchasing easier for food-service businesses. The goal is an intuitive, fast ordering process that adapts flexibly to customers’ day-to-day work. To support this, Telekom MMS developed an AI-based voice solution that sets new standards for the ordering process in B2B e-commerce.

• Faster and more intuitive ordering processes
• Relief for food-service businesses in their day-to-day work
• Stronger customer loyalty through improved user experience

Food-service businesses work under high time and cost pressure. Online orders often have to be placed alongside ongoing operations. In practice, they are frequently time-consuming: manual notes created in the warehouse are usually transferred later to the PC at the desk. At the same time, the product range is often complex and very extensive, which makes finding the right item even more difficult.

The existing e-commerce platform was set up together with Telekom MMS more than ten years ago and has been continuously developed ever since.

To make the often hectic day-to-day work of food-service businesses easier, the task was now to enhance the existing ordering process with a voice-based ordering function. The aim was to make ordering faster and easier, without users having to navigate through extensive product catalogs.

In addition, the solution needed to ensure a high recognition accuracy for products and order quantities, provide fast response times, and at the same time be simple and intuitive to use.

The solution developed by Telekom MMS combines modern voice and AI technologies from the Azure OpenAI environment for voice-based shopping basket filling (“Speech to Basket”).

A customized solution was developed for Service-Bund that automatically converts voice input into digital orders. Instead of relying on a standard product, Telekom MMS developed the business logic individually based on the requirements of Service-Bund and its customers.

Food-service professionals can order items by voice input — for example, using a smartphone or tablet directly in the warehouse. The AI recognizes products and quantities, matches them with the product range, and automatically fills the shopping basket. This accelerates the ordering process and significantly reduces manual product searches.

The solution was seamlessly integrated into the existing e-commerce platform and ensures a consistent shopping experience. Thanks to its cloud-based architecture and integration into the existing system landscape, the solution can be flexibly expanded and operated over the long term.

For food-service businesses, the AI solution provides noticeable relief in day-to-day work. Orders can be placed directly where demand arises — for example in the warehouse, during food preparation, or while planning the next order. Time-consuming intermediate steps and media discontinuities — such as manually transferring notes to a PC — are eliminated.

Ordering processes can therefore be accelerated, sources of error reduced, and employees noticeably relieved. The AI is also intended to help users quickly find the right products, even in very large product ranges, and thus contribute to significantly more efficient order processing.

Thanks to the uniform, high-performance platform into which the AI solution is integrated, Service-Bund can meet a wide variety of customer requirements precisely and further expand its service quality. The optimized digital shopping experience strengthens customer loyalty and becomes a strategic differentiator in the market. At the same time, with the AI-powered, voice-based shopping basket filling solution, the company positions itself as an innovative and future-oriented wholesaler in a dynamic market environment.

Service-Bund itself benefits from a platform managed holistically by Telekom MMS: development, hosting, operations, and load and performance tests are all provided from a single source. This reduces interfaces, increases operational reliability, and creates a dependable basis for the continuous development of the future-ready application.

Service-Bund is an association of medium-sized specialist food wholesalers from Germany and Austria that offers a full range of food products as well as customized logistics solutions. At 44 locations, 35 member companies supply customers from the restaurant, hotel, and communal catering sectors. The spectrum ranges from currywurst snack bars to Bundeswehr barracks, from hospitals to cruise ships.