Founders of the company identified a need for standardizing the way administrative information travels between parties. Prior to the Central Mid-Office (CMO) platform, the processes for booking, complaint management, and invoices were unstructured and inefficient.
Adventure Media set out to create an online environment to handle transactions in the media industry. The goal was to revolutionize the way players in this industry handle ad material, alongside its Central Mid-Office system, which fulfills a similar need for administrative data such as contracts and orders.
As an intermediary between customers, media agencies and publishers, NRp is responsible for selling advertisements on behalf of the regional newspapers in their portfolio. The company also has to accurately distribute advertising material and customer order information to the publishing companies. Due to the large number of placements (over 100,000 per year) and the complex processes, a regular stream of incomplete or wrongfully published advertisements exist that need careful review or correction. Most errors consist of administrative problems like wrong publish dates, page numbers or production problems like slight differences in print color. Media agencies reported these errors with a formal complaint, demanding compensation.
Commenting on the current functionality of the Portal, “In addition to placing delivery orders from their own stock in our warehouses, customers can also check stock-levels, make changes, or track at real-time the movements of their goods through the various warehousing stages and processes,” says Henk Pieffers, Operations Manager, HST Transmissions
Each week Sandd receives large quantities of post that, for one reason or another is undeliverable or simply wrongly addressed. Sandds standard procedure requires the manual processing of each item, in order to provide adequate feedback to the customer and clean the recipient database at the same time as an integral part of their customer service. To keep up with growing demand, Sandd needed to streamline the daily process of receiving and administering undeliverable parcels in over 100 local distribution centers.
The technical challenge in Shop Service Center project involved creating a system that could integrate with a variety of other systems as well as new, unknown, systems. These integrations had to be seamless, and avoid changing the original system itself. Therefore, all integration points had to be configured within the Mendix solution, rather than the older systems. Due to direct integration with their point-of-sale systems, the new solution would have to be able to respond to any buy request. Because internet connections in Eastern Europe are not reliable, a distributed inventory system that communicated a-synchronically was required.
A new Magazine Production Portal (MPP) was implemented based on the existing, users-appreciated functionality together with newly improved process functionality. Integration with the central SAP system for the financial settlement and control was also one of the main drivers behind the project. Almost every order, including purchase orders for off-the-shelf print jobs like appendices and inserts, are now automatically booked.
The company already had a back-office finance & administration system, Metacom, to process all project information. Mammoet now needed to find a faster and easier way of monitoring projects in progress, and to eliminate the enormous paper flow between its home base and its drivers. The first step was to install CarrierWeb computers in all its trucks. These in-cab computers, which are connected to CarrierWeb’s server through a GPRS mobile communication link, provide drivers with navigation tools and administrators at the home base with vehicle positioning & tracking functionality. Importantly, these onboard computers automate many of the functions the drivers perform manually—such as time, mileage and fuel registration—as well as track and book all this and other relevant project data to the correct project code.
The Order Management Portal, which has the Kuehne + Nagel house-style with its familiar look and feel, went live in April of 2009. It was delivered in six months and within budget. Unilever sends its orders to Kuehne + Nagel Logistics’ warehouse management system in the form of standard electronic data interchange (EDI) messages. Following some initial processing, the system sends the Portal order details and related current stock-levels input to the automated allocation process.
Marlies Dekkers needed a solution that was user friendly and accessible by a variety of parties. It would have to facilitate the planning and production of new designs, from initial concept development to a final bill of materials. This process involves many steps and many stakeholders. The challenges involved in the project were varied but mainly centered on the required integration with prior internal systems.
