After a year in use and many thousands of ABs, Adriaan de Jong is certain: "SHD ECORO AB Scan has proven itself and gets a little better every day. The system keeps learning with its OCR recognition. Our goal is a 75 percent recognition rate. We are working toward that, and it would be a major achievement."
DMG Meubelen B. V. has been using the SHD ECORO AB Scan module since autumn 2017. With this graphical application, the Dutch company reviews order confirmations (ABs) that cannot be handled via EDI. This speeds up the entire ordering process and reduces the cost of checking ABs. After one year of live operation, Adriaan de Jong and Harald Buys of DMG Meubelen describe their experiences.
Today we receive an average of 500 ABs a day. On peak days after Christmas, it can be as many as 1,000. It works smoothly.
Harald Buys, ICT Team Leader DMG Meubelen
The Dutch Mandemakers Group (DMG), founded in 1978 and based in Waalwijk, today employs more than 1,000 people in the furniture sector. DMG Meubelen, led by owner Ben Mandemakers with its 65 affiliated stores, includes renowned companies such as Piet Klerkx, Montél, Morres, and Woonexpress.
Renowned companies such as Piet Klerkx, Montél, Sanders Meubelstad, Morres, and Woonexpress are now part of the Mandemakers Group (DMG), founded in 1978. DMG Meubelen, based in Waalwijk, employs more than 1,000 people.
In many companies, incoming ABs are still recorded and processed manually, which is very time-consuming and costly. Automated methods are rarely used to check ABs. The result is extra effort, lost time, and high costs. DMG Meubelen wanted to change this.
At DMG Meubelen, SHD ECORO AB Scan processes both flat-pack and configurable items. For configurable items, however, automatic checking has only worked since SHD ECORO AB Scan was introduced. Before that, it had to be done entirely by hand. "At first we printed out the ABs for checking, later we had them as a PDF on screen. We then matched the item, the price, and the delivery date against our merchandise management system, MHS. The whole process was manual," explains Adriaan de Jong, IT and Organization Manager at DMG Meubelen, who has worked for the company since 1978. To process these ABs faster as well, DMG Meubelen decided in 2017 to introduce SHD ECORO AB Scan.
Thanks to the new SHD merchandise management bridge, SHD ECORO AB Scan could be connected to the MHS merchandise management system with ease. "Today we receive an average of 500 ABs a day. On peak days after Christmas, it can be as many as 1,000. It works smoothly," reports Harald Buys, ICT Team Leader at DMG Meubelen.
At DMG Meubelen, all ABs arrive electronically and are archived in conjunction with the PROXESS document management system. At the same time, PROXESS Xtract uses OCR recognition to extract all relevant data, such as supplier, order number, AB data, and prices, checks it against MHS, and makes it available to the workflow. The criteria for checking an AB are the item (type and specification), the quantity, the delivery dates, prices including terms and currency, and the delivery addresses. The SHD merchandise management system generally processes these transactions automatically in the background. The technical, visual review and processing of the order confirmations takes place in SHD ECORO AB Scan. Adriaan de Jong: "Given the wide variety of variants, languages, and spellings, the technical accuracy of the ordered furniture cannot be checked automatically. Here we check the match visually. Since the software highlights discrepancies between the two documents in color, this makes the review noticeably easier and faster."
After the commercial accuracy check, the document is usually forwarded to the sales staff. The salespeople then check things like the correctness of the upholstery fabric or wood type. SHD ECORO AB Scan can also automatically remove individual line items from the ABs, so that a salesperson without purchase price authorization cannot see those amounts. To avoid unnecessary delays in ordering, the review can also be monitored against deadlines.
DMG Meubelen, however, chose a different approach to checking ABs. "We deliberately decided to check both technical and commercial accuracy centrally, in one place. Our sales staff should not have to deal with standard administrative tasks. This takes the load off our staff at the POS, and they can focus 100 percent on customers and selling," explains Adriaan de Jong. At DMG Meubelen, SHD ECORO AB Scan does not just relieve sales, it has also made processing ABs considerably more efficient. Harald Buys: "We have become much more efficient, accurate, and faster at checking ABs, and as a result we can immediately flag any possible errors in the ABs. Another major benefit of the module is that all ABs are archived automatically."
Since the Dutch company also uses the B2B communication solution XcalibuR for two-way communication with its suppliers, XcalibuR likewise generates ABs as a result of clear-cut orders. These ABs are also read in and matched by SHD ECORO AB Scan at DMG Meubelen. "The only things that could be wrong with the ABs generated via XcalibuR are the price and the delivery date. And those are exactly the things we check fully automatically with SHD ECORO AB Scan. It happens in a flash and is very efficient. For us, SHD ECORO AB Scan brings together all the information for checking and processing order confirmations in a single solution," summarizes the IT and organization manager.
For us, SHD ECORO AB Scan brings together all the information for checking and processing order confirmations in a single solution.
Adriaan de Jong, IT and Organization Manager DMG Meubelen
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