Invoices and delivery notes: Joined-up processes increase transparency

ZG Raiffeisen, founded as a self-help organisation for farmers in the Baden region, has become a modern commercial enterprise and service provider with an annual turnover of around one million euros. Alongside the classic agricultural business, it is involved in energy dealing and runs a building centre and markets selling products for the home and garden. Such diversity requires stringent background procedures. The organisation's order processing system has therefore been optimised using software from tangro: around 100 000 delivery notes and 120 000 invoices a year are automatically processed in SAP. As a result, merchandise management processes are now tidily organised.

tangro software allowed all processing of incoming invoices - both cost and goods invoices - to be handled electronically and therefore faster and with greater transparency. The incoming invoices are imported electronically using EDIFACT or scanned and the relevant content detected and forwarded to SAP. Fields in the processing screen are therefore populated automatically and the invoice can be posted immediately if the data matches the purchase order.

However, rapid invoice posting was then often hampered by the fact that goods receipts were not being posted. The logical next step was therefore to introduce automated delivery note processing and centralisation of the process. To achieve the best synergy effects possible, the company again opted for software from tangro: "tangro DM came from the same provider as the software we were using for automated invoice processing and was therefore a great solution for automating our goods receipt posting. The two products complement one another perfectly," explains Claus Mohr, SAP team leader at ZG Raiffeisen. As hoped for, it proved very easy to introduce the automated delivery note processing. It only took half a day to implement and employee training took just half an hour thanks to the similar user interface. "There were no problems at all," says Claus Mohr.

Raiffeisen Baucenter GmbH receives around 1000 delivery notes a month at the pilot plant and they are all now posted automatically in SAP. There is virtually no rework as the system automatically processes the contents. Not only does the software recognise header data such as supplier, delivery note number and delivery note date. Using the order note, which is scanned along with the delivery note, the purchase order number is also recorded automatically.

This allows the software to propose the right items and very little reworking is needed. The system also covers special features and automatically converts subsets into alternative units of measure or uses alternative item texts, for example. There are now no entry errors.From three hours to fifteen minutesThe work involved in goods receipt posting, which has now also been centralised at the main location, has therefore reduced significantly. The move has resulted in a time saving of around 85 percent for collective delivery notes. The processing time for these special documents has been reduced from two or three hours to 15 minutes. In the past, the employees had to source information from various documents in order to post such collective delivery notes.

The process has now been changed such that collective delivery notes are no longer received and instead there is one delivery note and one invoice per delivery. Processing all these single documents takes just a quarter of an hour with tangro because all the information needed can be seen at a glance. Storage of business documents in the order processing system was digitalised during the course of the automation. While all delivery notes used to be stored in folders, now archiving is electronic. As soon as a document is posted, it is attached to the item document in SAP and stored. Searching for invoices and customer orders is therefore much easier: "Documentation is now much better thanks to automated delivery note processing. Everyone involved in a process can access the associated documents."