Case Studies

UK Motor manufacturer

Abbro was brought in initially to support export documentation, based on an Abbro implementation for a medical supplies company.

Abbro’s ability to mimic the look and feel of existing paper and system documentation was extremely valuable. This allowed a seamless switch to using Abbro, followed by a series of step changes, moving to a more efficient way of working.

A great deal of user time is saved. Thus, documentation that took an hour and a half now takes 7 minutes.

Business rules were put in to identify and clean data errors (e.g. wrong documents for country or invalid codes for vehicle type). Covering vehicles rather than medical supplies or consumer items means very different business rules – all handled quickly and smoothly.

This initially involved taking feeds and producing the export and other documentation. Abbro then moved from taking data feeds to directly taking data from the feeder systems and updating and correcting the data in those systems.

Additional functionality and rules were added to handle special circumstances e.g. exporting to certain countries involves highly unusual procedures unique to motor vehicles. Abbro was able to replace manual processes for look up of codes with different sets of values for each country – thus greatly reducing error incidence.

Data is drawn from a host system (which is being replaced). Abbro takes data buried in identifiers to produce the specification of the vehicle, with different rules for each country.

As Abbro is SoX compliant, it has been allowed to directly update the financial ledgers in the (Peoplesoft) systems in America, with invoicing shipment details.

The benefits from Abbro are in getting the documentation done quickly – and done right. Mistakes in paperwork in some parts of the world can result in huge delays and even more serious consequences. Abbro has become the place to go if you need to investigate anything

Initially Abbro was brought in just to cover export. As the capabilities for producing any documentation became apparent, Abbro has been expanded to support the full supply chain, so every vehicle passes through Abbro. Without Abbro, the company cannot ship a vehicle.

Since implementation in 2001, with every single vehicle passing through Abbro, there have been hardly any support calls made – which is above average reliability for a highly tailored package implementation.

Conclusion: This demonstrates the flexibility of Abbro. To adapt a system to the very different export of motor vehicles under extremely difficult circumstances (company take-over) – without any hitches & providing a base for further, continuing expansion is a remarkable story.

Global medical products company

The initial application was to take data feeds from the existing systems plus two more bespoke systems and produce the various documents and reports required. This was done by Abbro, as the existing systems could not be (easily) adapted to produce these documents from the existing three systems.

Each of the report requirements had variations, depending on various criteria such as country, client, goods and type. Abbro produced the reports automatically by applying different business rules for the specific documents required relevant to country and customer. Typically, this reduced the time to produce a document from one hour to five minutes.

During the implementation, errors and inconsistencies were repeatedly found in the data feeds. Consequently, business rules were added to highlight these for manual correction.

More substantial support was provided for some surrounding processes. Abbro provided the functionality to compare deliveries and orders and to both produce the credit/debit paperwork and provide the financial and statistical data – essentially becoming an accounting package.

The next phase was to take a separate feed with the pick list from the warehouse information and provide the various documents required relating to the deliveries and shipping. Documents for DHL and other carriers were produced. An add-on from this was to provide real time information on stock levels. Previously, the stock levels could not provide ear marking and goods intended for one customer got hi-jacked by a separate order.

It became clear to the customer that it was far easier and quicker to get relevant information from Abbro than the host systems. The next development was to provide sales statistics. This involved providing comprehensive, real time, integrated sales and delivery statistics. In addition, government required reports (Intrastat and EC sales lists) were produced, along with internal documentation (e.g. invoice ‘appendices’)

From the company:

“ABBRO is invaluable to us and has played a major part in the day to day running of the business over the past five years. ABBRO produces our Export and Internal documentation to enable us to have full tracking of shipments within the organisation, enabling faster input from our Host Systems for data processing to produce all our Export and internal Documentation. By keeping detailed record information on each consignment produced, it has also provided statistical data reports to give an overall view of the Product Sales and Marketing analysis in each market sector. Also we have benefited immensely from ABBRO being a totally configurable solution and being able to grow with the ever increasing needs of the Export department and product range requirements. The flexibility of ABBRO means it has also been a considerable bonus to us regarding the efficiency of being able to adapt to our business practices, such as Sarbaines Oxley compliancy etc.. To put it in to context we have recently completed a 'Shipment Sheet' project in ABBRO. This was a manual process that took on average around three man hours to complete, they are now produced by ABBRO in only a few minutes. As ABBRO is fast becoming our backbone for producing documentation, we are currently evaluating ABBRO in other business areas.”

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