J. García Carrión has a rich family history within the wine industry, dating back to 1890 when the company began distributing its wine in France. Today, it is a leader in Spain’s wine and juice market, exporting to more than 155 countries. As the company grew, J. García Carrión wanted to develop an order management process that would improve efficiency and reduce costs while maintaining excellent customer service.
The Challenge: Managing a Large Volume of Orders Manually
Each year, J. García Carrión receives more than 30,000 orders outside of the electronic data interchange (EDI) workflow, amounting to an average of about 120 daily email and fax orders. Email and fax orders must be processed manually, creating a longer order processing time and potential increase in order entry errors.
For the company to process an order manually, it must print the emailed order, enter the order information into the SAP system—an enterprise resource planning (ERP) infrastructure—and save physical files. Each order entry took several full-time employees an average of two minutes to process.
As order volumes increased, this process became unmanageable and left little time for employees to work on higher value tasks or proactive customer service activities. J. García Carrión determined that new order management processes were needed so that the company could improve productivity, reduce the number of errors resulting from manual order entry and increase visibility. In addition, the company wanted to eliminate the need for paper, improve customer satisfaction and minimize the risk of losing documents.
The Solution: Implementing Order Processing Automation
In an effort to improve processes, J. García Carrión selected Esker, a cloud-based document process automation solutions provider, to help the company improve order management efficiency and accuracy, while creating a single point of access for all documents.
Implementing the order processing automation solution took approximately two months to complete. The solution allows J. García Carrión to receive all orders digitally and then extract and validate data automatically. Before automation, the company would have to enter the order data into the ERP infrastructure manually, but now the order is created directly in its SAP system. Esker’s order processing automation solution integrated seamlessly with the current ERP system the company had in place, which allowed for a smooth transition to the cloud. Automation has also allowed the company to consolidate and store everything electronically, giving employees access to all documents from a single platform.
J. García Carrión chose Esker for its ability to combine key features into one solution, including digital acceptance of all orders, automatic order creation, intelligent data extraction, unified electronic archiving and easy data validation.
Using a multi-criteria search engine, customer service managers can select specific fields to seek customer orders when needed. Combining multiple fields (e.g., customer name, purchase order date, currency, etc.) can help refine the search, and predefined views can be used to show lists of customer orders. Users also can easily create their own views and make them available to others.
The Results: Increasing Efficiency and Productivity
Since implementing order process automation, J. García Carrión has seen significant results and achieved its goals of improving productivity, accuracy and customer satisfaction while accommodating growth. Orders are processed 80 percent faster, with a 70 percent reduction in order processing costs. The company also is experiencing a 99 percent order entry accuracy rate and 100 percent process visibility with SAP integration.
In addition to the business benefits, J. García Carrión has improved its environmental sustainability—the 30,000 documents that the company now automatically processes saves an equivalent of 2.5 trees and 384 kilograms of CO2 emissions every year.
