1.2 million order confirmations in SAP

Conrad Electronic SE, one of the leading international distributors of technology and electronics, relies on ultramodern processes. Even to process the approximately 1.2 million incoming order confirmations it receives every year. 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. “More than 3000 order confirmations a day are now cleanly, quickly and traceably processed using tangro,” says Robert Scheuchenpflug, Director of ERP Systems at Conrad.

“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.” “We have got the flood of emails under control with tangro OC,” adds Andreas Trescher, SAP expert at Conrad Electronic.

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. The entire supply chain uses the notification data for the next steps of processing. In the event of discrepancies, tangro firstly verifies whether the deviation lies within the tolerance range accepted by Conrad or not. The software automatically uses the tolerance key stored for this in the SAP ERP system. If a review is needed and the supplier has to be contacted, the automation solution simplifies and speeds up this process too: „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,“ says Robert Scheuchenpflug, Director of ERP Systems at Conrad.

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. “A normal user cannot read an IDoc data record,” 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. “Anyone can recognise the virtual document perfectly, read off item numbers, prices and quantities and check contents. This makes reviewing errors much easier and has speeded up the process significantly,” says Robert Scheuchenpflug.