Order confirmations and payment advices notes

For the automatic processing of inbound documents in SAP, electrical wholesaler Emil Löffelhardt chose solutions from Heidelberg-based tangro. As well as order confirmations, which are entered quickly, efficiently and reliably with tangro OC, the company now also uses tangro PA-IS to process payment advice notes. Emil Löffelhardt will shortly introduce a tangro solution for automatic invoice and order processing.

Manually processing the 5,000 order confirmations received on average every month meant that this couldn't be achieved, as entering the documents was simply taking too much time. The sheer volume of data also meant that with manual data entry, errors were common. To optimise the process, a year ago the company decided to automate the processing of order confirmations. One of the key criteria in the search for a solution was the complete embedding of the software in SAP – a criterion that quickly settled the decision in favour of tangro OC. "tangro is fully embedded within SAP – it's a part of the SAP ERP system. This means the amount of IT support required is minimal because there is no need to set up and maintain an additional work centre for validation. Authorisations also remain the same," explains Stefan Klingler, who is responsible for data processing and organisation at Emil Löffelhardt.

Emil Löffelhardt receives order confirmations by fax server, e-mail and EDIFACT, so there are no scanners. Instead, data is captured electronically and the relevant content, such as purchase order number, supplier and delivery date, are detected by Optical Character Recognition (OCR). If the article or item numbers can be unambiguously assigned, prices and quantities are then compared at item level. The automation of document entry with tangro OC has accelerated the whole process. "With tangro OC we save a lot of time," says Klingler. This applies even when the date cannot be automatically recognised – a common occurrence due to the different forms and date formats used by suppliers.

This is because tangro OC can process the complete purchase order at the touch of a button and all dates can be recorded at once with a mass maintenance task. The document image can be viewed as a PDF, so the user can see at a glance whether the content of the purchase order and the order confirmation match. In the event of an enquiry, each MRP controller can also see immediately the date on which the order is due to be delivered, and provide quick and accurate information.

And it isn't only with order confirmations that tangro has delivered accelerated processes, because payment advice notes are now also entered automatically with tangro. Advice notes indicate that a number of due items have been paid as a one-off collective payment, so often contain a lot of information. The payment advice notes at Emil Löffelhardt may be up to 10 pages long and include 150 items. All the content is now processed automatically in SAP with tangro PA-IS (Payment Advice Notes – Industry Solution) with a recognition rate of almost 100%. The tangro solution has doubled the processing speed and has also significantly improved transparency for both payment advice notes and order confirmations. "As far as we are concerned, tangro PA-IS is indispensable," concludes Stefan Klingler. As the next step, the company plans to start processing invoices and orders with tangro technology: "With tangro, you can grow easily."