Optimised processes for inbound documents

BLANCO and BLANCO CS are two companies who have to deal with mountains of paperwork. The financial accounting department receives some 70,000 invoices per year, and the sales department handles an average of 250,000 documents sent in by customers. Seeking to reduce the workload on staff, Blanco opted for solutions from tangro, which enable the incoming documents to be entered in SAP automatically.

The financial accounting department uses tangro IM (Invoice Management) to process invoices, the sales department handles incoming orders with tangro OM (Order Management). Thanks to transparent and automated workflows, the internal company processes for inbound documents have been tightened up and made more efficient. As the data quality has now been improved and the information is stored centrally, the need for post-editing has been substantially reduced. 

The two companies, which are based in Oberderdingen in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, focus respectively on kitchen technology and on catering systems, medical care systems and industrial components with a worldwide sales network covering about 100 countries, production sites in Germany, Canada and the Czech Republic as well as subsidiaries in numerous countries. Their products are sold primarily in Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia. In view of their international orientation, one of their criteria for deciding on the tangro solutions was that they support multiple languages and country-specific regulations.

Before Blanco started using tangro OM for its automated incoming orders process, only a small proportion of the documents could be processed automatically in SAP. The previous system recognised a meagre 15 % of the documents received. The rest still had to be entered manually.

"With the tangro solutions we have successfully optimised our document capture for financial accounting and sales, and have even exceeded our targets. With tangro IM we have been able to halve the time spent on processing incoming invoices. tangro OM for incoming order processing is used to read all the documents into the SAP system. This gives our employees significantly more time to work actively with customers", says Werner Gassner, deputy head of Blanco's IT Services.

In view of BLANCO's international orientation, one of their criteria for deciding on the tangro solutions was that tangro supports multiple languages and country-specific regulations. "tangro solutions have unbeatably short project timelines. The successful rollout of tangro OM for the sales departments in the US and Canada took just 14 days."