Ingeniously simple even for orders

The Fischer Group has 5200 employees and 49 companies in 37 countries worldwide. The company focuses on innovation and quality, also in its internal processes, which are continuously optimized across departments, divisions and countries. "We want to carry out our order processing as promptly as possible with a compact team, and of course as error-free as possible," explains Michael Mader, Head of Administration and Controlling.

Fischer chose Tangro because the solution is embedded in SAP.

"OCR recognition simply runs in the background, without any additional workstation for pre-capture. The clerk views and processes the incoming orders directly on his screen", says IT process manager Thorsten Holl.

"The interface is similar to the familiar SAP environment, so users can find their way around the system very easily. We liked that a lot."

During processing, the order screen is displayed together with the contents recognized by the system. This makes checking the order data particularly easy. From the IT perspective, the S/4 capability of the Tangro solution was not the least decisive factor, because next year the changeover to the new ERP system will begin.

The automation of order processing was started in the German sales company of the Fischer Fastening Systems division. Here, the focus is primarily on standardized articles that are supplied from stock via an article number. To DIY stores, the building materials trade or to the production connection trade, which in turn supplies craftsmen's businesses and industrial customers with Fischer fastening systems.

This is a mass business with a high daily order intake. And with the requirement of daily readiness and fast delivery: All orders must be booked on the day they are received. If shipments are to leave the premises on the same day, processing must even be completed by the cut-off time in the early afternoon. This is only possible if order entry is fast, smooth and as error-free as possible.

This is not a problem with orders that are received electronically via EDI (Electronic Data Interchange). These orders are machine-readable and are therefore booked directly in SAP. However, more than 65,000 order documents a year still arrive at Fischer by fax or e-mail. The contents of these orders must first be entered into SAP, which takes an enormous amount of time with manual entry and a volume of up to 60 items per document. With Tangro, this process now also runs electronically: the software now processes around 90 percent of fax and e-mail orders completely automatically.

"Automated job processing with Tangro has saved us a tremendous amount of time. Now we get daytime work done even better."says Thorsten Holl.

Tangro captures the relevant content from the order and independently fills the required field values with the recognized data. This includes, for example, header data such as the customer, order number and order date, as well as the delivery date and the ordering clerk at the customer.

At item level, the system recognizes, among other things, the item number, the article, the quantity, the unit of measure, and the total price. This means that all the relevant data needed to post the order in SAP is available - without any manual effort at all.

"Employees don't have to type anything anymore"., says Thorsten Holl, "but can devote themselves to testing and learning the system."

Training new document content is an important function for order entry because it allows the sales process to continue without stalling. Sales documents are more individual than accounting documents and have many more specificities. These different layouts must be trained to the system.

Thorsten Holl: "Learning new order documents is so easy with Tangro that clerks can take over this part, as part of their daily order processing."

In the Tangro inbox, all orders received by fax or e-mail are listed and processed according to sales channel and division. The same applies to offers and returns. These document types are also automatically recorded with Tangro.

This gives order processing a further boost in terms of optimization: if there is already an associated quotation for an order, Tangro recognizes this immediately and thus facilitates data reconciliation. This ensures, for example, that agreed conditions are transferred to the order. Thorsten Holl comments: "That's the beauty of Tangro: When I refer to the offer, I can see the prices directly and compare them.

The specific requirements at Fischer, for example with regard to the selections in the inbound book or the recognition of the different document types, were largely covered by the customizing. Following this success story, the system is now to be rolled out to other national companies, depending on whether SAP is in use and whether the quantity structure, fax receipt and type of orders have a similar structure.