SUCCESS STORY
Distrelec GroupIndustry• ElectronicsSolution• OpenText™ Vendor Invoice Managementfor SAP Solutions®

Partner support• AvelonResults
Captures data from digital andpaper documents
Replaces manual SAP data-entry
tasks with automated workflows
Cuts risk of human error, helping
to avoid customer delivery delays

Distrelec Group fosters loyalty withresponsive customer experiences
Electronics distributor automatically captures key data with®
™
OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions, helping
to reduce manual work and ensure timely deliveries.
“Instead of having employees type
information such as productquantities and dispatch dates into
SAP, OpenText Vendor Invoice
Management for SAP Solutions uses
optical character recognition tocapture the information automatically.”
Andrea Ferrino

Head of Applications
Distrelec GroupDistrelec Group fosters loyalty with responsive customer experiences

Distrelec Group is a leading distributor of electronics, automationand measurement technologies, with e-commerce and brick-andmortar stores in 15 European countries. Through its distribution
centers in the Netherlands and Switzerland and its international
partnerships with global resellers, the company serves customers
around the world.
With more than 200,000 products, Distrelec Group depends ondata to forecast demand, plan assortments in its warehouses andcoordinate fast and efficient logistics. Like many leading distribution
businesses, the company uses SAP solutions to support theseprocesses from end to end.
Andrea Ferrino, Head of Applications at Distrelec Group, says,“Offering responsive experiences is crucial to foster customer
loyalty, especially in the age of e-commerce. Meeting these
expectations starts with getting data from our vendors’ purchaseorder [PO] confirmations—for example, product quantities
and dispatch dates—into SAP ERP. As well as supporting ourplanning and purchasing activities, this information allows
us to display accurate delivery estimates to customers on oure-commerce sites.”Centralized processes, repetitive tasks
Vendor PO confirmations are a vital data source for Distrelec Group’s
planning process. As part of an ongoing business transformation
initiative, the group moved processing of PO confirmations to acentral team—but extracting the data manually presented challenges.

“It’s crucial to input data from PO confirmations into SAP ERPaccurately, because errors can lead to warehouse stockouts
and delivery delays,” explains Ferrino. “In the past, we reliedon manual work to bring this information into SAP ERP.
As well as increasing the risk of human error, this approach
consumed a significant number of person-hours, driving up
our operational costs.”
As part of its transformation strategy, Distrelec Group has also
centralized customer order processing to a dedicated team. Heretoo, employees manually keyed data from emails, phone calls
and faxes into the SAP system. Ferrino adds: “We knew that
automating repetitive data-entry processes had huge
potential to reduce costs and cut the risk of errors in multiple
business areas.”

Deploying an automated platformTo build reliable, automated workflows to capture mission-critical
data, Distrelec Group engaged its trusted partner Avelon to deploy
OpenText™ Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) for SAP® Solutions.
The solution enables Distrelec Group to optimize information
processing for a wide range of document types, including quotations,delivery notes, PO confirmations and sales orders.
“We had already been using Vendor Invoice Management for
invoice processing for a number of years, so we knew that theOpenText platform was robust and reliable,” recalls Ferrino.
“When Avelon informed us that the solution also offers costeffective support for many other types of documents, we quicklyrealized its potential.”“As we develop theOpenText solution, we’reconfident we can freethe business to focus onvalue-added planning andpurchasing activities.”
Andrea Ferrino

Head of Applications
Distrelec GroupDistrelec Group fosters loyalty with responsive customer experiencesShaping efficient workflows
Working with expert consultants from Avelon, Distrelec Group
mapped out its manual processes and converted them into
digital workflows.
“In the past, customers would send orders to our sales team via
email, and the team would rekey the information manually into
the SAP system to create the order,” Ferrino explains. “Today, we
automatically convert these emails into tickets in our SAP CRM
solution, removing the need for rekeying. We then generate thesales order, and SAP emails a confirmation back to the customer
as a PDF.”
Ferrino adds: “The sales team’s service-level agreement [SLA] forcreating a new sales order is just 10 minutes. We’re now looking
for ways to further accelerate the automated workflow, helping toensure that the team can always meet their SLA.”

Preparing for the future
In parallel, Distrelec Group is working with Avelon to streamline theextraction of all-important data from PO confirmations. “Instead ofhaving employees type information such as product quantities

and dispatch dates into SAP, the solution uses optical character
recognition [OCR] driven by a powerful machine-learning
engine to capture the information automatically,” says Ferrino.
“As we develop the OpenText solution, we’re confident we
can free the business to focus on value-added planning andpurchasing activities.”
Looking ahead, Distrelec Group plans to build on its investment inVendor Invoice Management—empowering it to offer even more
responsive customer services.
“One of our key goals is to offer customers the best choice ofinnovative technologies, delivered fast,” concludes Ferrino.
“Thanks to our work with Avelon and OpenText, we’re buildingautomated processes that will help us ensure a high-quality
experience for every customer.”Partner Information:
Headquartered in Utrecht in the Netherlands, Avelon helps
enterprises leverage solutions such as Vendor Invoice Management tooptimize SAP business processes and make them more user-friendly,accessible and transparent.

About OpenText
OpenText, The Information Company,
enables organizations to gain insight
through market leading information
management solutions, on-premises orin the cloud. For more information aboutOpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX)
visit opentext.com.
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