About Client
The client is a manufacturer and retailer of about 6000 types of disposable products used in the foodservice, janitorial, sanitation, industrial, hospitality, and medical industries. The company deals in both B2B and B2C space and is a quality leader for trusted quality disposables. This premier manufacturing client has various shipping points across the United States. The multiple distribution points include Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas.
Manufacturing
The Challenges
1. PO Due Date Upload
The client works with a large customer base and handles its operations/transactions through EDI.
- The challenge faced by the client was that purchase orders received from selected customers via EDI were not updated with the latest PO due dates. This was because they had not set up any PO update triggers from their end. The staff had to update the PO dates manually in the system for a large number of customers, which was time-consuming and hectic.
- The company received one spreadsheet with information on approximately 3000 PO due date updates. Compilation of the POs in one spreadsheet and updating them in the system, one-by-one took more than a weeks’ time and spreadsheets piled up. It impacted the processing and delivery of their purchase orders.
The Solution
01.
Programmers.io became the client’s IT, partner, to resolve the problem. Our team came up with a design to put a spreadsheet in a specific directory being created in IFS, which was mapped to the drive of associates from the Warehouse management system.
02.
We created custom programs to access the IFS spreadsheet from that directory and process records. Thereby, updating the POs with their due dates all at once. A Menu option was added into the S2K ERP interface to run this process.
03.
Our team also implemented a feature wherein a report was created that contained the error record data from the spreadsheet with a comment on additional info on the error, to validate failures, resolve and re-verify the data.
04.
The team delivered end to end custom features in 3 days, including designing, development, and testing
Business impact
- The client now saves a significant amount of time by automated updates in Purchase orders.
- The client witnessed a sharp increase in the pace of PO deliveries.
2. Price override for open orders
The client used to import pricing data for customer items into the S2K ERP system (IBM i backend) on daily basis at regular intervals. Businesses decided to re-price the open orders based on the latest customer-item price being imported into S2K. It included the permit of free freight allowance change to be done for the order total exceeding the cutoff amount set by the business.
- The customer sales representative team members had to manually go through each open order every day to update the latest price.
- This took almost 50% of their time going the open orders and repricing; and slowly, the other customer requests started piling up.
- A few of the open orders that required price updates were left unnoticed. These orders were processed and billed on old prices which generated losses for the company.
The Solution
01.
Programmers.io team gathered all the functional requirements from the client’s Business Analysts about the ERP system, its functionalities/rules being in place.
02.
Our team designed a standalone program that could be scheduled to achieve the task with the table-driven structure for the set of rules in functional requirement.
03.
We automated the entire process of order editing along with order releasing.
04.
Our team created log files for auditing price changes and created a menu option for reporting the log file as an excel spreadsheet to the user who runs it. It was added to help the business users to validate/verify the price changes, taking care of clearing up of old data from log files too.
05.
We conducted the testing after module development and gave the BAs a walkthrough.
Business impact
- Our solution helped the client’s CSR team save up to 50% of work hours every day which were previously spent in manual activities such as ordering line updates for pricing.
- The automated system generated bills with the latest prices being imported to the system, eradicating the chances of losing revenue.
- Post solution implementation no escalations were reported.
3. Updating EDI 855 (Purchase order acknowledgement)
The client is using S2K ERP that was incapable of sending regular updates for EDI 855s (purchase order acknowledgment) for each change in order. Customers dealing with the client through EDI, raised grievances as the order confirmation sent to them didn’t contain the latest information of price/quantity updates or line-item cancellations on the invoices (EDI 810 documents) they received. The billing information did not match the order confirmation sent by the client.
The Solution
01.
Programmers.io team analyzed the then functionality of the 855 triggers for any change in the orders. Our team designed a new table-driven architecture to be integrated with the EDI purchase order processing.
02.
Our team presented the design and action plan to the client and completed the development and testing of the functionality post-approval.
03.
Because of the criticality of the project, we delivered the solution in 2 weeks. It enhanced the capability of the system to send out EDI 855s with the changes, every time an order undergoes any changes until invoiced.
Business impact
- The new architecture led to happy customers because the billing details were now in sync.
- The triggering led to syncing of details from EDI 855 (PO acknowledgment confirmation) to EDI 810(invoices). This enhanced business transparency and customer trust.
- Post solution implementation no escalations were reported.
Technology Stack
Business Impact
Programmers.io enabled the client to easily manage the users and applications by building a modern web portal. Our team suggested the use of SSO (Single Sign On) for signing in and OAuth 2.0, which ensured the security of the web application.
Programmers.io enabled the client to look at and maintain all their items through the application of a web catalogue in an easy and convenient way. Previously they had to maintain details (in DB2) and images (in image server) separately. Now they can maintain both from a single point.
Programmers.io invoice app helped the client’s customers to download their invoice from the application anytime. It has saved the time of both our client’s sales people and their customers.
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