Success story
WavinIndustry• ManufacturingSolution• OpenText™ Business Centerfor SAP® Solutions

Services• OpenText Professional Services

Results
Saved time on order entry, freeing
up time for customer-facing tasks
Reduced manual processing timeand overall costs
Enabled order handlingfrom multiple channels withpre-conversion to PDF
Improved overall data quality
and accuracy

Wavin automates sales order capture
with OpenText
OpenText™ Business Center for SAP® Solutions increases speed
and accuracy, reducing costs“Over the coming months, we will expand our usage ofOpenText Business Center for SAP Solutions to another 15 or
so countries, accelerating the return on our investment andfurther improving the service we provide our customers.”
Stefan Felschen

Project ManagerWavin

Wavin automates sales order capture with OpenText

Originally founded in 1955, and now part of Mexichem, Wavin is
a leading supplier of plastic pipe systems and solutions. Wavin
products are used in both below and above ground applications inareas such as water management, heating and cooling, water andgas distribution, waste water drainage and cable ducting.
The firm employs around 5,000, and has presence in more than
25 countries. Headquartered in Zwolle in the Netherlands, Wavin
has more than 30 manufacturing sites, mainly in Europe. OutsideEurope, it operates through a global network of agents, licensees
and distributors.
Many of Wavin’s clients do not have electronic data interchange (EDI)
capabilities, and therefore submit their orders by email, fax or on paper.
This creates a time-consuming task for sales teams, who must manuallyenter these orders into Wavin’s SAP system.
Project Manager at Wavin, Stefan Felschen, explained, “It’s not only thetime it takes to manually enter order data, which detracts from other,high-value tasks, but the concern is also the risk of incorrect data
entry. This, in turn, leads to higher costs.”“We looked at a number of solutions, including from our existing
EDI provider, that were unable to provide the functionality we wereseeking. From our research, the best fit for our needs was OpenText
Business Center for SAP Solutions,” explained Felschen.
Wavin has been using SAP since the 1990s and over the past 10 years,
has been working to standardize every country onto a single template.
The new OpenText Business Center solution complements this strategy,
supporting a true enterprise-wide deployment in the future, not only forsales orders, but potentially any other unstructured document type.

Proof of concept success leads toaccelerated deployment

Working closely with the sales team, a proof of concept (POC) wasundertaken to ensure the OpenText solution would truly meet theneeds and expectations of the business. Following sufficient testing
to ensure the solution was indeed able to recognize and capture
all order information from a variety of inbound formats, a pilot
implementation commenced in three countries, Netherlands, France
and the Czech Republic.

Wavin researched solutions to automate and accelerate the sales order
entry process, and reduce the associated costs. Ideally, a new solution
would be capable of capturing the unstructured data from a paper, email
or fax order, and convert it to structured data for automatic entry to SAP.

“We made the conscious decision to start small, build knowledge
and then accelerate deployment later on. We engaged OpenText
Professional Services to design and implement Business Center,and they supported us throughout our learning phase to going live,”
said Felschen.

When considering potential solutions, Wavin involved its system architects, IT and the business, i.e., the sales teams, to ensure requirements
were met and would fit with the wider, strategic SAP platform in use
across the business.

Incoming order documents are first converted to PDF. Business Centeris then used to recognize and extract the required order data, which canconsist of hundreds of order lines involving thousands of product units.
The extracted data is then automatically injected into SAP, triggering theorder process.

Making a strategic selection“We engaged OpenText
Professional Services
to design and implement
Business Center, and they
supported us throughout
our learning phase togoing live.”
Stefan Felschen

Project ManagerWavin

Wavin automates sales order capture with OpenText

Flexibility to handle unique processes

To support high user adoption, Wavin wanted to use existing process
templates from across the organization to ensure familiarity for its users.
Some additional development was undertaken to achieve this, including
the handling of ‘ship to’ addresses.
“One of the complexities that we faced is that a number of ourclients have multiple locations, for example merchant warehouses.
When they provide an order, they are centrally generated and look
the same for every location. OpenText helped us configure andteach the machine-learning algorithms of Business Center to locateand extract the ‘ship-to’ details from customer orders,” Felschen
explained. “In reality, it’s often difficult for the human eye to locate
this information from a paper, fax or email order, as all orders fromthat merchant have the same layout, logo, order header information,etc. However, OpenText Business Center, with its learning capabilities, is providing high success rates of data extraction, saving usfurther time.”
Once extracted, the ‘ship-to’ information can be used to quickly performa check in SAP to determine if the location already exists. If the location
doesn’t exist, a simple pop-up can be triggered to allow this to complete
this action. By capturing the correct information early in the orderprocess, Wavin can better serve its customers, provide accurate billingand ensure deliveries are made to the correct location.

Positive reaction from users and the wider businessIn the three pilot countries, the response from those involved in thedesign phase and go-live has been highly positive.
“Our users say that OpenText Business Center is really helping
them in their day-to-day work. It is now easier to get orders intothe system. This saves time, perhaps only a few minutes for someorders, but it all adds up when dealing with hundreds of orders,”
said Felschen.
Understanding and knowledge of the solution is growing too, as planned.
By focusing initially on a small number of customers that place orders
regularly, the solution is able to learn quickly. This means the sales teamspends less time checking orders. The goal is to ultimately have a zerotouch sales order process as deployment accelerates.
Internal reporting is also being enhanced by OpenText, which
is providing Wavin with additional EDI data to feed to its
management dashboards.
“With the successes achieved to date, and the business fully on
board, we are now ramping up usage in the three pilot countries. Sofar, around five percent of orders are being processed in the pilotcountries through OpenText, with the potential for growth, but thebenefits of time savings and improved accuracy are already veryevident,” Felschen explained. “Over the coming months, we will
expand our usage of OpenText Business Center to another 15 or socountries, accelerating the return on our investment and further improving the service we provide our customers.”

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.
Customer stories

opentext.com/contact

Twitter | LinkedIn | FacebookCopyright ©2018 Open Text. OpenText is a trademark or registered trademark ofOpen Text. The list of trademarks is not exhaustive of other trademarks. Registeredtrademarks, product names, company names, brands and service names mentioned
herein are property of Open Text. All rights reserved. For more information, visit:
http://www.opentext.com/2/global/site-copyright.html (02/2018)09034#