Industry: metal industry

Number of employees: 100

Revenue: 15.000.000 €

The problem

Arcoprofil is a company specialized in the production of toothed profiles. One of the main sectors in which these products are used is the automotive industry.

Over the last years, in the automotive industry, the EDI has established as the de facto standard for sending and receiving orders and invoices; hence the need to manage this type of files.
The problems to be solved were then two (inbound and outbound):

• Incoming side, to be able to import and make it readable EDI files and automate the process of data entering into the corporate information system.
• Outgoing side, to convert dispatch notes and invoices in an EDI format compatible for the transmission to the customer.

It was also necessary to implement a process for the composition and printing of labels for pallets that had to be shipped to customers.

Before choosing Station, the process required a lot of manual work:

• EDI orders files were downloaded from a portal on the customer website
• the downloaded files had to be converted in a readable format through a dedicated software
• the file in a readable format was printed
• information contained into the printed orders were manually entered into the ERP

As regards the output streams:

• Arcoprofil had to manually enter the details of the dispatch notes and invoices in the customer website
• From the customer portal, data were transformed for the EDI
• The same data had to be inserted again in a specific file for the creation of labels

This process, besides being very laborious, turned out to be unsuitable to answer some specific requirements of some customers.

Initially the company had thought to let manage the various documents directly to the VAN, but this solution proved to be very expensive.

The solution proposed by Arket

Regarding the management of incoming EDI files, Station automates the process of creation of the order starting from the mapping done on the received EDI file. The document thus obtained is then automatically inserted within the management system, where it will be validated by the user.

The EDI outgoing files, i.e. dispatch notes and invoices, are automatically created by Station, starting from data in the ERP. In the case of dispatch notes are also created the respective labels.

The data exchange with the ERP takes place through tables of support implemented on a dedicated shared database.

The EDI provider is used exclusively as VAN, that is it is responsible for ensuring the correct transmission of incoming and outgoing files, but does not make any kind of control that goes beyond the formal consistency of the file. The VAN provided the customer a software that is responsible for contacting customer/supplier VAN using specific protocols.

Arcoprofil now no longer needs the supervision of an operator for the file conversion to EDI: Station works completely independently, without needing to interact with a user. The process is then fully automated both incoming and outgoing.

This results in the optimization of the times and procedures, with a great saving of resources, time and money.