Voss Automotive, manufacturer of line and connection technology for the international automotive industry, has automated its electronic business transactions that use its customers’ web portals and integrated them into its corporate IT processes and systems. With the help of Lixto Software’s web process integration solution, Voss can now automatically gather and prepare logistics data from customer portals and seamlessly process this information as required in its proprietary SAP system
As a development partner for the automotive industry, Voss Automotive has established a number of market standards for the line and connection technology for commercial vehicles and cars. About half the commercial vehicles in Europe are said to use Voss air brake systems and almost all European cars with air suspension contain Voss components.
Companies like Voss must be able to react to customer demands quickly and cost-effectively if they want to maintain their market position. But what is the best way of doing this when, in certain areas, the processing of electronic transactions with EDI solutions is simply too expensive and their manual processing has become far too complex and time-consuming? Voss Automotive faced this challenge when looking for a solution to provide enhanced logistics support for its order transaction processes.
A growing part of the communication between customer and manufacturer in the automotive industry is carried out via web portals, in particular for core processes such as quality management, distribution, engineering and logistics. However, web portals vary greatly and their numbers are increasing.
The growing use of such portals results in additional input and expense for suppliers such as Voss. Employees need to log on to every portal to collect or enter data. This is time-consuming and expensive, and has a high potential for errors.
Automated extraction of delivery data from customer portals
Voss Automotive aimed to gather delivery requests from smaller customers automatically and process them directly in its internal logistics applications.
“We wanted to reduce the required expenses and make the collection of delivery requests more efficient by replacing manual tasks with an automated solution,” says Walter Funke, Voss application management director.
Voss Automotive has used a web process integration solution from Lixto to integrate the portals of commercial vehicle customers and automotive suppliers. This solution automatically accesses the web portals of its customers, extracts delivery request data and prepares and transfers the relevant information directly to the company’s internal SAP system.
Voss uses Lixto’s solution in the form of standard web services. This takes advantage of Lixto’s web intelligence technology for the automatic, regular collection of order information from the customer portals and for sending notification of changes to the logistics center of Voss Automotive. Currently, delivery request data from eight plants of two Voss customers are being retrieved this way. In total, 16 processes between eight customer plants and the two Voss plants in Germany have been automated.
Time savings
Joachim Förster, SAP customiser logistics, Voss Automotive, says the elimination of manual tasks has resulted in valuable time savings. According to internal estimates, another part-time employee would have been necessary to take care of these tasks. Now employees no longer have to spend time accessing customers’ web portals themselves, in order to collect and process delivery requests.
A reliable, efficient and flexible standardised work environment
“With Lixto, Voss Automotive was able to standardise the work environment of its employees. From an internal order processing perspective, there is no difference between the delivery requests from the customers integrated by Lixto and the ones from our EDI customers,” says Funke. All collected data is transferred into the regular work environment, so orders look similar.
Since its implementation, Lixto’s solution has been running smoothly in the background – without requiring any maintenance from Voss. Logistics staff generally do not know anything about a delivery request or a change until they have to initiate the logistics processes related to a specific delivery, or to review the status in a report. The Lixto solution usually makes relevant changes on the customer portals so quickly that the notification sent to Voss Automotive also contains information on the job’s status.
Voss chose Lixto because of the solution’s good price-performance ratio, but also for its flexibility and reliability. Lixto uses a technology to prepare companies for future challenges posed by B2B Internet applications. Lixto can process and integrate data from highly dynamic Web 2.0 web pages. The visual development environment it provides enables easy and quick configuring of the web processes to be automated.
Extending the solution’s scope
Funke regards the options to extend Lixto’s solution as another advantage because Voss has already established a platform for the integration of web-based data for additional applications and functional areas. For example, the company is prepared to set up a similar solution for quality management requirements.
