THE CHALLENGE
COMPANY PROFILE Woco Group based in Bad Soden- Salmünster, Germany, is an automotive corporation which has production and sales locations in 20 different countries, including the United States, Russia, Germany, France, Hungary, India, Czech Republic, China, and Romania. The company is a Tier 1 supplier to Ford, with two manufacturing plants in India, and 45 suppliers across India. |
EDI document transactions between Ford and Woco occurred on a portal provided by Ford. Because of global standards for supply chain management processes that provide industry best practices (called MMOG/LE), Ford recommended that Woco create an EDI compliance program for their Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers. Ford officials arranged to visit Woco for inspections to ensure that these stringent guidelines were being met, adding to the pressure
to find an EDI program capable of quick implementation and onboarding.
The main challenge Woco faced was the excessive amount of manual data entry required to process orders and enter the relevant information into their ERP. The company used a customized ERP solution that was not integrated with their 45+ suppliers, and most of their suppliers were not using any ERP. The exchange of documents and acknowledgments of orders were all processed via email or phone call. The process of receiving and sending invoices to every supplier for different orders on Excel or PDF format was not only time consuming but also greatly increased the risk of inaccurate data caused by human entry error. To make the process easier Woco also wanted their suppliers to print and apply VDA labels to their products. (VDA is a data format used by Ford in Europe for EDI messages.)
SOLUTION
ABOUT DICENTRAL |
Founded in 2000, DiCentral is a leading global provider of B2Bi managed services. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, DiCentral has offices worldwide supporting customers in more than 27 countries. DiCentral’s services and solutions are singularly focused on B2B integration and are used by many Fortune 1000 companies, processing over $200 billion in transactions for over 30,000 organizations worldwide. The company’s vertical expertise transcends through the automotive, retail, distribution, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, healthcare, energy and financial services. DiCentral provides turn-key cloud-based B2Bi managed services, which allows organizations to connect and exchange critical business documents with their trading community. The core components of the managed services offering include ERP integration, secure B2B communications, data transformation, business rule analytics, inventory management and trading partner community management. The company develops and markets a complementary suite of supply chain applications. Visit www.dicentral.com. |
To comply with the MMOG/LE guidelines and remain a Tier 1 supplier of Ford, Woco opted for DiCentral’s Managed Services Solution, due to their global presence and understanding of unique automotive EDI standards. The supply chain optimization process was split into two phases. In the first phase, Woco chose 25 suppliers, and DiCentral provided Woco & these suppliers with a web-based management tool for exchanging EDI documents and printing VDA labels. With this tool, DiCentral accelerated communications dramatically. The supplier could send the acknowledgement of PO on the same portal. The solution streamlined the order process between Woco and their suppliers, accepting order invoice exchanges in EDI format and then downloading them in Excel or PDF format before printing & applying VDA labels to the products.
RESULTS
DiCentral helped Woco increase their data accuracy and eliminate many of the problems that had previously slowed the work efficiency of their business processes. In the second phase, beginning soon, Woco will implement EDI automation with their other 20 suppliers, adding DiMetrics, DiCentral’s exception management tool. This will create customized alerts to notify the proper employees when a business rule violation is pending, allowing for a swift resolution before the error impacts the supply chain.
“DiCentral’s EDI Managed Services is very helpful in the smooth exchange of supplier orders and invoices. The portal eased the process as it streamlined our tracking, and made the whole process paperless. The portal was up and ready for use almost instantly and has proven incredibly cost-efficient. We sincerely thank DiCentral for implementing EDI managed services for Woco Asia!” - Pankaj Gupta IT-Infrastructure and Operations Manager Woco Tech Elastomere Noida Ltd. |