DAW shows its true colours in order processing

Want to give your home a new look? It's easy with paints and varnishes from the DAW Group. The owner-managed company, based in the Odenwald, is the market leader for construction paints in Germany and Austria. The Alpina White wall colour and the Caparol product line with the emblem of the colourful elephant are recognised all over Europe. The company has an annual turnover in excess of EUR 1 billion and employs 5,500 people at around 140 locations in Germany and another 30 worldwide. Order processing is automated with tangro OM (Order Management). 

To respond even more effectively to customer requirements, DAW decided to automate its order processing system with tangro OM. DAW is structured by brand, with separate sales units and order processing teams for each brand. The majority of incoming orders, particularly orders from DIY retail chains and wholesalers, are processed by EDI. However, a huge volume of orders is still received by fax: Caparol receives around 62,000 faxed orders per year for approximately 370,000 items, while Alpina receives some 24,000 faxed orders for around 300,000 items. Orders are also occasionally placed by phone.

The system from the Heidelberg-based software developer has been in operation for over a year, delivering accelerated processing of customer orders. The key factor in favour of the tangro solution was direct access to SAP without the need to import or export master data. Another crucial factor was ease of use - the system had to be simple to use even for employees accustomed to entering orders manually for 30 years.

Since tangro OM was rolled out at DAW, employees involved in order processing have been able to use their time more effectively. There is no more need for time-consuming tasks like walking to the fax machine, carrying documents from A to B and refilling the fax machine with paper. tangro OM takes the data from the fax server, automatically recognises content such as customer, purchase order number and order items, and assigns them to the appropriate customer in SAP.

Meanwhile, the system automatically works out the delivery date based on the customer's location.Richard Klink, Head of Customer Service at Alpina, confirms the same improvement in his own department, adding: "We no longer lose any documents - every order received goes into the system." tangro OM takes the data from the fax server, automatically recognises content such as customer, purchase order number and order items, and assigns them to the appropriate customer in SAP.

Meanwhile, the system automatically works out the delivery date based on the customer's location. The loss of documents is precluded, all orders are reliably detected. There is also no more need for paper-based filing, which for Dirk Selzer, the manager responsible for DAW's Order Service Centre, is a crucial advantage of the tangro system. As soon as an incoming document has been entered as a customer order, it is attached to the customer master record and archived as a tamper-proof document. "It saves an enormous amount of space. Our processes have also been optimised because all users have access to the same data." This not only makes it easier to find a document in the event of a query, but also makes staff absences easy to manage because anyone covering a position can access the tangro OM invoice entry list. These features have made tangro OM indispensable at DAW.