Conrad Electronic: 1.2 million order confirmations in SAP

Conrad Electronic relies on ultramodern processes – even to process the approximately 1.2 million incoming order confirmations it receives every year. Offering over 4 million products (at conrad.de), Conrad Electronic SE is best placed to help its 21 million customers worldwide overcome their challenges. The recipe for success is digital know-how coupled with operational excellence and customer-focused procurement. One important element of this approach is tangro software, which rapidly and conveniently processes 1.2 million order confirmations a year in SAP.

At Conrad Electronic, order confirmations play an important role in the procurement process. As soon as confirmation is received from the supplier and is posted in SAP along with the date and quantity, customers are informed of when they can expect to see the goods they have ordered. This information is also forwarded directly to the online shops so that up-to-date delivery dates can be provided in the shop. Goods receipt logistics can also plan their capacities and thereby make optimum use of their staff. 

For the vast majority of order confirmations, this is a fully automatic process, whereby the documents arrive by EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) and are posted directly in SAP. However, around 200 order confirmations a day are still received by email and first have to be entered and checked before they can be posted in SAP. Both procedures have been optimised thanks to tangro.

For EDI documents, the software helps with troubleshooting and correcting errors. And tangro now provides automated processes for processing the email-based documents: “In the past, entering the document-based order confirmations was a very labour-intensive manual task. Now the amount of processing has been minimised because email confirmations are entered automatically,” explains Robert Scheuchenpflug, Director of ERP Systems at Conrad. “We have got the flood of emails under control with tangro OC,” adds Andreas Trescher, SAP expert at Conrad Electronic. “The documents are now entered in SAP without delay and, provided there are no deviations, are posted instantly.”

In the case of e-mail-based order confirmations, tangro recognises the key data and content and compares it item by item with the purchase order data. If everything is OK, the order confirmation is posted in SAP for the purchase order. In the event of discrepancies, the automation solution simplifies and speeds the review too: “The agent is able to either correct the deviations using a convenient user interface or contact the supplier directly from tangro by email. With tangro, the message is automatically sent to the right person,” explains Andreas Trescher.

The tangro entry journal acts as a central job pool. Based on set selections, each employee is automatically assigned his or her work list. Documents which have already been posted can be called up again here, for example in the event of queries. The same applies to email documents. The email is attached to the purchase order in SAP. So queries, from other departments for example, are easy to handle using the self-service principle.

More than 90 percent of order confirmations at Conrad are received by EDI and can be posted automatically. However, time and again agents find that an EDI data record isn’t structured correctly or that there is a discrepancy between the content of the EDI document and the purchase order. An error message is then issued and the process comes to a halt. In the past, the staff in purchasing found troubleshooting and reviews to be virtually pointless: “A normal user cannot read an IDoc data record. So if errors arose, IT always had to intervene to work out where exactly the discrepancy was,” explains Trescher. “But with tangro, users are able to easily monitor EDI documents – without the help of IT. "The system generates a virtual document from the IDoc data record, which looks just like a normal order confirmation entered as a PDF. “More than 3000 order confirmations a day are now cleanly, quickly and traceably processed using tangro", says Robert Scheuchenpflug.

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