G. Menshen: Order processing completely automated

"tangro is a relief in our daily business," says Sabrina Zarges from the Georg Menshen company.

"We have completely automated order processing, improved data quality, and always have a central overview of all incoming orders. Our employees now have more time for customer enquiries."

As a manufacturer of closures and packaging systems for a wide range of industries, G. Menshen strives to drive innovation and sustainability. This is lived out in product development, where a closure with recycled content was recently awarded 'Patent of the Month'. And in internal processes, where the focus is on digitalisation. In sales, order processing was automated with software from tangro, making it faster, more precise and paperless. Sabrina Zarges, who was jointly responsible for the project as Team Leader Customer Support, says:

"We no longer have to type anything. All orders are reliably recorded. Our employees only take a last, controlling look at the order and then create the order in SAP at the click of a mouse."

Georg Menshen manufactures both standard closures and closure systems specially designed for specific customers. Customer orders are based on the customer's own material numbers, which are linked as a leading characteristic value to the corresponding quantities, reference and material numbers in SAP. Before automation, all order information was typed manually, the correct orderer was searched for in SAP, the contents were compared with the SAP data, and finally the document was archived in paper form.

With tangro, this process is now digital. The software records all relevant contents such as the ordering party, goods recipient as well as customer material numbers, quantities and prices and compares the recognised values with the existing SAP data. This eliminates manual work and data entry errors, which can occur when typing in data manually, are largely eliminated. When the customer orders are entered, the documents are also archived electronically, so that filing in folders is no longer necessary. At the same time, research is simplified, says Sabrina Zarges:

"The nice thing is that all orders can still be called up in tangro afterwards if questions arise."

All orders received are listed in the tangro order entry book. A colour-coded traffic light shows the employees at a glance which orders have been fully recognised and where rework is still necessary. For about 80 percent of the orders, the traffic light is green, indicating that tangro has recognised all contents completely and correctly. For the vast majority of orders, no further processing is necessary. The employees simply create the order in SAP at the click of a mouse. Sabrina Zarges is correspondingly satisfied with the recognition rate:

"The orderer and goods recipient are recognised very well. The recognition of the material lines is also getting better and better."

Only about 20 per cent of the orders still require rework, for example because freight cost items or certificate cost items are added. But here, too, tangro offers effective support, e.g. through internal information texts that point out the necessary rework depending on the customer. And through the possibility of simply transferring content from the order PDF to the processing mask via drag & drop.

So far, orders have mainly been received by e-mail, some by fax. However, the long-term goal is to process orders fully automatically via EDI. The decisive factor in choosing the software was therefore that tangro supports automated processing of e-mail and fax orders, but can also process EDI orders. The S/4HANA capability of tangro played another decisive role in the system selection.

Another plus point for tangro: the solution not only maps all order processing standards, but also the special requirements of the packaging industry. At the same time, the software is designed so flexibly that new legal requirements can also be implemented without any problems. For example, tangro now checks whether the customer's VAT ID number is present on an order and verifies whether this number matches the customer master data stored in the SAP ERP system. This ensures that orders whose transport of goods abroad is handled by the contractor itself are treated correctly for tax purposes.

"The staff at tangro supported us perfectly here,"

Sabrina Zarges is enthusiastic. The positive experiences from the implementation project, which was completed within only three months, have thus been confirmed for her once again.