Improved efficiency to order

Conrad, a provider of technology for the B2B and private client sector, uses the tangro OM solution to process its incoming offline customer orders in an automated manner. This new approach has made order entry faster, simpler and more cost-effective.

tangro OM is embedded in SAP and therefore permits high levels of efficiency at both the frontend and backend. At the frontend, because the user interface is the same as the SAP GUI and users therefore know instantly how to navigate their way around. And at the backend, because the system doesn't need an upstream workstation and access SAP master and transaction data directly. "We opted for tangro because all the interpretation and order processing takes place on one workstation. Any change made to the customer master data is included in the order right away," explains Robert Scheuchenpflug, Director of ERP Systems and deputy IT area manager. With other systems, updates would have to be run permanently to keep address changes up-to-date at all times, for example," he adds. "We wanted to avoid all that toing and froing with data."

As one of the leading omni-channel providers of technology for the B2B and private client sector, Conrad has to handle huge amounts of data: its database includes around 30 million items of customer data and more than one million items. Effective handling of such volumes of data was another requirement of the automation solution. Since its software has an open design, this is another area in which tangro shines through. The SAP experts at Conrad were therefore able to work hand in hand with tangro's developers to integrate all requirements. "tangro's user exits provide a lot of flexibility for enhancements. We were able to latch onto these defined points in order to link up our own, high-performance algorithms. We wouldn't have even considered a rigid system."

Conrad Electronic SE, based in Upper Palatinate and with 17 foreign subsidiaries across Europe, provides technical solutions for your every need - be it for craft producers, development labs, start-ups or industrial clients, for users, technology geeks or makers. Shop conrad.de is therefore one of the top ten most frequently visited online shops in Germany. The lion's share of purchase orders come from the online shop or via EDI and therefore exist as structured data records, which can be posted in SAP fully automatically without any manual input.

At 3,000 documents a day or 80,000 a month, these orders present a huge volume, that is time-consuming and costly to process as first the content of these documents has to be entered before they can be posted into SAP. "We wanted to speed things up and improve accuracy," says Matthias Ascherl who works in Customer Care at Conrad. Faster and even more accurate tangro OM has optimised order processing. The system automatically recognises the ordering party, customer purchase order number as well as the goods recipient and items along with quantity and material number.

The new system has sped up the order entry process by around 30 percent. What's more, the error rate - which was already pretty low - has been halved again. "These days we can't really talk about order entry - as the system handles the entry element. Employees now mainly verify the order. They simply check whether the machine has read the data correctly and whether the order can be posted without delay," sums up Matthias Ascherl.

One important benefit for employees in customer service is also direct assignment of the original customer purchase order with the order in SAP. Before automation, they always first had to undertake the lengthy process of finding the relevant purchase order should there be any inquiries. Now the original document is linked directly to the order in SAP and can be simply opened at the click of the mouse. Inquiries from customers can therefore be clarified quickly and reliably - to the satisfaction of customers and employees. Employees are just as delighted with how easy the solution is to use. "All it takes is one day for a new employee to be familiar enough with tangro OM to correctly and quickly operate the system," says Matthias Ascherl. This is very important because we need to be able to quickly process customer orders at all times. And especially in the B2B sector where Conrad has a promise of delivering orders the day after they are placed. Different agent groups Implementation of the tangro solution concentrated initially on the B2B sector. tangro OM is now in productive use for all order types. A distinction is made between purchase orders from corporate or private clients and purchase orders from customers with particular technical requirements, for example. The neutral document entry list, which also forms part of the tangro solution, ensures that all order types reach the right agent. On the one hand, this management tool ensures that only purchase orders end up in the order processing document entry list. On the other hand, it automatically forwards orders to the right agent group.

"We are at a point where the system delivers one hundred percent of what we need from it," says Matthias Ascherl by way of summarising the automation project. "Nobody wants to go back to the days before tangro. Colleagues in other Conrad foreign subsidiaries are equally impressed and want to implement the solution as soon as possible."