Maximum efficiency for customer orders

Greater efficiency and paperless processes in customer service. At UVEX Arbeitsschutz, order entry has been automated with tangro software and secure, electronic archiving guaranteed. Not only are orders now reliably posted at speed, but can be viewed from any location at any time. This has enabled the company to successfully overcome recent challenges.

UVEX Arbeitsschutz processes around 200,000 orders containing around 750,000 items a year. A large proportion of documents contain low-value orders. So it was crucial for the company to process customer orders at maximum efficiency while retaining high levels of data entry quality.

“Using tangro, we have greatly sped up our order processing and further reduced errors.”

This says Georg Meixner, Customer Service Manager at Uvex Arbeitsschutz GmbH. Two of the software’s characteristics help improve efficiency in particular: that it is embedded in SAP and has a user interface matching the SAP system. “The SAP look & feel is a huge benefit of tangro. Our staff feel that they are in familiar surroundings and quickly get to grips with the system,” explains Meixner. “Since the solution is embedded in SAP, we are fully migrating to SAP. We can access the SAP master and transaction data at any time at the click of the mouse to view issues these contain. All without having to change workstation.”

One unbeatable advantage for UVEX is also automatic storage of the original purchase order with the order. “This is a big benefit to us because we can finally put an end to paper records and achieve permanent, secure archiving.

Searches for customer orders using the references of ‘order confirmation number’, ‘delivery note number’ or ‘invoice number’ are guaranteed to find what we are looking for.” 

The software is now being used in all customer service units, which operate with SAP R/3. So it is used in Germany, Austria and Switzerland as well as the UVEX-Arbeitsschutz subsidiaries in Germany. All orders which UVEX previously received by email, post, fax or even telex are now efficiently posted at speed. The tangro software automatically recognizes customers as well as material and item data and compares these against the SAP master and transaction data. Georg Meixner is particularly impressed with the automatic customer recognition function:

"The customer recognition function in tangro works really well. 98 percent of customers are correctly identified.”

Automatic pre-sorting of documents also ensures smooth processes. Anything that isn’t an order is filtered out in advance. So only orders end up in the processing system.

The all-in-one interface, located next to the document image and edit screen, is very helpful for post-processing. If data has to be added to or corrected, all the important information is available at a glance.

The functions for improving recognition and programming the document design are also important tools in order processing as customer orders often don’t have the same layout. All customers use their own order documents, which change all the time too. “With around 20,000 customers, it’s a real challenge to recognise the huge number of different order documents,” says Georg Meixner.

“Thanks to tangro’s self-learning functions and the ability to train the system to recognise more content and document designs, we are further optimising recognition and improving all the time.”

Even now, there are hardly any mistakes in order processing and what was already a low number of complaints has fallen even further. As a result, no-one wants to work without tangro any more.

“Initially, our staff were pretty sceptical about an automation solution. But now, no-one can envisage order processing without the help of tangro. ”

About Uvex

UVEX produces and sells protective and safety products for the professional, sports and leisure sectors. It operates 48 subsidiaries in 22 countries. Most production is based in Germany, where 70 percent of the total 2630 employees are located. UVEX's occupational health and safety products are the main focus, representing around 75 percent of total sales.