Business Situation

Allied Steel SA chose Avanade to implement an integrated order management system. It was based on a Microsoft platform to market steel and steel-based products in multiple countries around the world.

The new management system required purchasing and sales document workflows. It also needed the means of exchanging documents between the manufacturing plant and customers. The documents included Allied Steel’s supply orders to the Manufacturing Mill, order confirmation and the sales invoices issued by the plant in relation to dispatched goods. Such an implementation offered the possibility of running statistics on product sales based on product families, size and quality standards and geographical areas.

Allied Steel choose to upgrade from their previous antiquated system to the Microsoft solutions which would enable them to:

• Speed up the document exchange process with the Mill
• Enhance the sales office productivity level
• Perform more effective controls on the data sent to their customers

An Order Handling solution was designed for Allied Steel SA based on the Navision Attain 3.60 solution. The integrated system enables automatic management and control of the following processes:

• Active Cycle
• Passive Cycle
• Deliveries
• Sales Statistics

Solution

The workflow developed for the customer automatically generates sales orders based on purchase orders received, including all related printouts. To help this process, an additional feature was developed enabling orders to be automatically generated in Excel, merging the existing data within the excel files that were manually created by the Mill.

Furthermore, the solution automatically and independently generates the sales invoice from the purchase order document, feeding the information into an Excel file that is ready for output.

Results

The solutions implemented by Avanade have provided multiple benefits, including:

• Reduced workload for the staff in charge of manually converting the data on Excel files
• Increased control of data exchanged with the Manufacturing Mill and customers
• Timely control of the data sent to customers
• Regular statistical analysis of revenue data with multiple reports available.