Siemens Australia has selected the Esker Sales Order Processing solution to automate the processing of its ‘unclean’ customer orders into SAP.

Located in Melbourne, the Siemens Customer Care team for the Industry Products group processes more than 30,000 orders per annum across a range of highly technical products (including Building Technologies, Industrial Automation, Water Technologies and Drive Technologies). These orders can be a mix of stock to order or purchase to order items.
Siemens embarked on a journey to improve its customer order processing function by first concentrating its efforts on increasing the number of ‘clean’ orders that could be processed more easily by the Customer Care team. Phase two focused on improving the processing of the remaining ‘unclean’ orders that arrived and could not be processed immediately. ‘Exception’ orders include orders with pricing mismatch, orders with incorrect part numbers or configurations, orders from customers on credit block, etc.

Clean Orders are orders that once they are received – can be entered straight into SAP by the Order Processor (CSR) without any questions being asked – you can then track anything that happens in SAP e.g. short-ship, time to process. Unclean orders are orders that cannot be entered into SAP without clarification from Sales or Marketing or Supply Chain or Finance or the Customer so they need rework to fix before they can be entered into SAP. Additional effort and increases time to delivery thus resulting in non-conformance costs and a decrease in customer satisfaction.

After a series of projects to improve its ‘clean’ order rate, Siemens decided that it should invest in a solution to decrease the order processing time for ‘unclean’ orders. Having evaluated some alternative scanning solutions, Siemens selected the Esker Sales Order Processing solution for SAP.

“We use Esker for all of our product orders. Esker processes all orders coming in via email or fax to either create the order in SAP without any typing or to reject the order. Additionally, the images of all orders are now available as attachments in SAP,” said Tom Amour, Process Analyst & Project Manager, Siemens Australia.

Siemens wanted to fast track the implementation in order to achieve the expected business benefits in as little as three months. Esker set up a team of local consultants experienced in sales order processing solutions for SAP and accepted the challenge to deliver a completely working solution in production within the timeframe.

The technical team at Siemens included experts located in Melbourne, Singapore and Thailand.

‘The Esker project team has been very responsive and we have found the communication throughout the project to be excellent (even with the project teams operating from different cities and countries),’ says Tom Armour.

Solution Gains have seen a reduction of order processing time by 65% and reduction of ‘unclean’ orders turnaround time by 80%. There has been a reduction in processing SLA time (waiting time for order to be processed) by 70%.

‘We review these metrics every three months, and after six months of operation we are achieving all tangible benefits and exceeding intangible benefits,’ said  Armour.
Siemens Australia is planning to further leverage its investment in the Esker DeliveryWare platform to extend the Esker Sales Order Processing solution to other divisions within Siemens Australia.

Additionally, Siemens Australia is exploring the use of the formatting and document delivery capabilities of Esker DeliveryWare in order to integrate some customer care communication into its processes.