Paper-free: Incoming orders and invoices

At the German/French manufacturer of electrotechnical installations Hager, orders and invoices numbering well over 100,000 per year are now entered automatically using the tangro Inbound Suite. The same goes for in excess of 10,000 payment advice notes that need processing at Hager each year. A rigorous selection process took a close look at seven systems, with tangro coming out on top. This wasn't just due to the fact that the software company offered a convincing solution for processing incoming invoices, but - unlike the competition - it also came up trumps with order receipt processing and payment advice notes.

What clinched the deal, however, was that the tangro solution if fully embedded in SAP: "Of all the systems on the market, tangro is the solution with the deepest and best integration in SAP," sums up Willi-Gerd Schmitz, IT manager SAP basis at Hager Group. "This point was critical for us, as we map out entire business process directly in SAP. This makes it considerably easier to maintain the solution." Unlike payment advice notes and invoices, it is significantly more difficult to detect the content of orders, as these documents have a much less structured layout than invoices. So Schmitz is more appreciative of the solution tangro OM, which has now been in use at Hager for around a year and a half: "tangro OM recognises more than 90 percent of the orders automatically if the quality of the incoming fax is good and the content is correct. That's a much higher recognition rate than I'd anticipated."

The IT specialist is particularly happy that tangro dedicated itself to meet Hager's specific requirements and realised special conversions from external to internal material numbers, for example. "The number of complaints has fallen by half with tangro OM. Costs incurred by Hager due to subsequent deliveries caused by incorrectly entered orders have also dropped significantly as a result."

Unusually, the automated processing of incoming invoices was introduced last at Hager: first of all in France, where no automation had yet taken place, and then at the German office. Here in Blieskastel, 300 to 400 invoices are now processed automatically each day - with scanning of the documents, parking in tangro and sending of the documents for approval.

Sandra Bauer, Head of Accounting, said of the benefits of this completely paperless procedure: "Automated processing of the invoices has made us considerably quicker and we avoid errors. What's just as important to us, though, is the fact that the entire approval and release process is mapped in the system.""Our decision to use tangro was a good one," sums up the IT expert Schmitz. "tangro fulfilled Hager's requirements for an automated incoming processing solution. We are now faster, more effective and have fewer errors when it comes to processing incoming documents and there's no need for any more paper handling."