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    Reference Fertinger

    Automotive purchasing becomes automatic!

    The medium-sized company RF Fertinger, which produces at a total of three locations (two in Austria, one in Poland) as a TIER 2 supplier for the automotive sector, introduced eProcurement from DIG in 2011. In 2016, ispro-NG was added for the area of machine maintenance. This creates potential for improvement, which is currently being considered.

    Fertinger_logo

    Sector: Automotive supply industry

    Web: fertinger.at

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    At Fertinger, eProcurementis seen as a growing part of a living organization. This refers to oxaionfor directmaterial and the DIG platform for indirect material, with both systems being operated independently of each other. The latter is used at all Austrian locations: in 2020, the 77 registered users alone placed 1,500 orders with a volume of €1.5 million. "We started with eProcurement ten years ago," recalls IT manager Dipl.-Ing. Helmut König. "Today, in addition to direct materials, Fertinger also orders operating resources and office supplies via one of the two platforms provided for this purpose."

    Approval processes by value and product group

    "The platform helped us in 2019 in particular - even though fewer purchases were made," König says with a wink, referring to the company's successful equalization. "This showed the value of transparency: The overview of what's open in terms of volume, which orders are out, who's ordering what and where you can optimize- all of that helped us through the tough times!" Thanks to the approval system, less urgent purchases were put on the back burner: In DIG's eProcurement platform, the authorized heads of the specialist departments require approval from Purchasing or the management, depending on the value limit. " A separate workflow is also provided for certain product groups. For example, computers or smartphones always have to be approved by me," explains König.

    Potential for greater efficiency

    The embedding of the ispro-NG maintenance software in the procurement workflowprovides a differentiated picture : "While pneumatic spare parts, for example, are created throughout, others are not available on ispro. These then come as free text orders - this is regularly the case with ball bearings, for example." In any case, orders are placed centrally via the DIG platform. However, there is no interface to ispro-NG , where no orders are triggered. König is positive about the fact that such an interface would also enable information to be exchanged with oxaion: "This would make it easier to compare stock levels between all systems." Updating master data between the ERP system and ispro-NG would also be a significant advantage. "Overall, there is definitely potential to further increase efficiency in purchasing!" This also refers to the communication between oxaion and DIG.procure: "We deliberately opted for a very lean version at the time. Thanks to the flexibility of DIG, we can create new possibilities with appropriate interfaces. We are currently discussing this."

    Grown constellation offers opportunities

    "The fact that people can now order directly takes a lot of pressure off the purchasing department," says König, summing up the positive side. The quality of informationhas also improvedcompared to the past : "There were often missing or incorrect details that were sent to the purchasing department. We even eliminate this problem with free-text forms by requesting quotations from the requirements department. This way, all the necessary details are automatically included." Free text orders are also used in the company for services: "Maintenance work, training courses etc. are all procured in this way!" And it works so well that over 90% of all orders are already processed in this way, which leads directly to the target side of the considerations: "There are outliers in areas such as flight or hotel bookings. Even urgently needed repairs to equipment such as printers often go their own way."

    > IT Manager Dipl.-Ing. Helmut König still sees a lot of potential for business digitalization at Fertinger.

    Guided buying as a possible expansion stage

    "We only hear good things about the system from our colleagues," says König, expressing his satisfaction with DIG's eProcurement platform. In addition to physical catalogs, individual suppliers are connected via an OCI punchout. Only recently, 17.5 million itemswere made available in Austria by connecting the Mercateo supplier platform, enabling one-off requirements to be procured easily and transparently. "We discovered this for ourselves via our sister company in Germany. The huge range makes it easier to offer the right selection in every situation." At the same time, however, this also requires a certain degree of control: "For cell phones, for example, we have a fixed partner that I request outside of the system because we don't have a catalog or similar. A guidance systemthat specifies the right paths for the individual procurement fields would be a big help!" In fact, guided buying as an add-on could improve the performance of eProcurement at Fertinger in a simple way - and an interface to ispro-NG could create further benefits. "Especially with growing systems, it's worth taking a regular look at the processes and analyzing the potential for optimization," confirms König.