Even the best ERP system leaves 10 – 20 % of your processes uncatered for. Approving invoices, managing contracts, issuing certificates, archiving emails, and processing POs are examples.
Ski Bygg is a family owned supplier of building materials, serving the southern part of Norway since 1919. Experience has taught Ski Bygg the long-term value of working with only the best of brands, products, and suppliers. You see that in their product assortment, as well as in their IT infrastructure with M3 from Infor.
Most orders are fulfilled from an extensive stock, managed automatically in M3. Orders for non-stocked items takes a little more attention. Once the order is logged in M3, the system automatically issues a PO.
For suppliers that cover 80% of the orders, this PO is in EDI, and so is the confirmation. In this case only the delivery requires manual work. This leaves 20% of the orders for manual processing. Getting M3 to send the PO as PDF by email was easy. Watching the myriads of confirmations being processed manually caused for some heavy speculations. 20% taking 80% of the time.
Then we put Next® in charge. Automatically capturing the emails. Verifying PO numbers in M3, and using data from here to file a PO copy in their Next® archive. Matching confirmations with POs, and asking the relevant salesperson to take action, whenever there is a mismatch.
Even when you use EDI, you get mismatches and unidentified confirmations. Now Ski Bygg has a process for them as well. A single click lets Next® take over, and gets the process rolling.