Automated processing of customer orders in SAP

The fisher wall plug is the epitome of inventive genius. It’s a fantastic idea, which revolutionised the building sector and which produced a world-class company: the fischer group has a workforce of 5200 and operates 49 companies in 37 countries around the globe. The company has automated the job of processing customer orders in SAP with tangro software.

“We want a small team to be able to process orders in as close to real time as possible and, of course, we want to eliminate as many errors as possible. By automating this process with tangro software, we are processing our orders faster and more precisely,”

explains Michael Mader, Head of Administration & Controlling at fischer. fischer opted for tangro because the solution is embedded in SAP. “OCR detection simply runs in the background without us needing an extra workstation for preliminary entry. The clerk views and processes the incoming orders directly on his or her screen,” says IT Process Manager Thorsten Holl.

“The user interface is similar to their familiar SAP environment, so users quickly find their way around the new system. That is what appealed to us.”

Another tick in the simplicity box comes from the fact that when processing, an image of the order is displayed along with the content detected by the system. This makes checking the order data a very simple task. Last but not least, from the standpoint of IT the S/4HANA capability of the tangro solution was the deciding factor as the company is starting to switch to the new SAP-ERP system next year.

fischer fixings deals mainly with standardised items. It’s a high-volume business where a huge number of orders are received every day. Orders received electronically by EDI are posted directly to SAP. But fischer still receives more than 65,000 order documents a year by fax or e-mail. The content of these purchase orders first has to be entered in SAP. With tangro, this process is now also an electronic one: the software now automatically processes around 90 percent of the orders received by fax and e-mail. Thorsten Holl says:

“Automated order processing with tangro saves us a huge amount of time. We are now able to achieve much better same-day processing.”

tangro enters the relevant content from the purchase order and automatically fills the field values needed with the data detected. All the relevant data needed to post the purchase order in SAP is therefore available.

“Staff no longer have to type in anything,”

says Thorsten Holl, “instead they are able to focus on checks and teaching the system.” The latter, training new document content, is an extremely important function for order entry. Sales documents are more individual than accounting documents and contain many more specifics. The system sometimes has to be trained in these different layouts. Thorsten Holl explains how this can be very easily done with tangro:

“Training new order documents is so simple with tangro that the administrators are able to do this themselves as part of their daily order processing.”

All orders received by fax and/or e-mail are listed in the tangro document entry list and further processed by distribution channel and division. The same applies to quotations and returns. These document types are automatically entered with tangro. So order processing is optimised yet further as tangro recognises when a purchase order is received for an existing quotation, which simplifies the replication of data. Thorsten Holl adds:

“That’s what’s great about tangro: when I look at the quotation, I see the prices straight away and can replicate them.”

The implementation project was quick and easy. Following the launch of the project in the spring, it went live in the summer and by the start of the autumn over half of purchase orders received by fax and e-mail were being processed automatically. Thorsten Holl: “Our staff instantly took to the system because they are familiar with SAP and tangro has a similar look and feel.”