Bakkersland

Pim van der Gaag, IT consultant at Bakkersland explained further, “We lacked confidence that our orders had been delivered, and sometimes they weren’t. This meant a lot of time-consuming manual checking, phone calls to suppliers to confirm receipt and a lack of end-to-end visibility of our supply chain. We had to find a better, more reliable and transparent solution.”

OpenText Notifications, the perfect ingredient

The Bakkersland IT team turned to OpenText partner Nokavision to improve the fax provision at the firm. Nokavision had been working closely with Bakkersland for many years, having implemented OpenText Communications Center Enterprise (now known as OpenText™ Exstream™). The CCM solution provides document output for a wide variety of content, including invoices, labels and orders for the firm.

“We approached Nokavision as a trusted partner for potential solutions and they recommended OpenText Notifications. This allows us to seamlessly output our orders via OpenText CCM, having been generated in our ERP system. Notifications, which is a cloud-based service, then handles the delivery of the fax orders to our suppliers,” said van der Gaag.

Moving to Notifications has removed all reliance and the cost of the fixed ISDN lines. The service is also more elastic, able to handle any peaks in traffic volumes. There is no hardware or software on-premises, removing the need for hardware maintenance, software updates or back-ups.

Lower risk with immediate feedback

With the old fax system, there was no automatic notification of a problem. A manual report had to be scrutinized for any failed deliveries. This was time-consuming and it was all too easy for a failure to be missed. “With Notifications, if a fax fails to deliver, the originating user is notified by email within 10 to 15 minutes. The solution is set up to automatically attempt three transmissions at five-minute intervals, before reporting a failure. Our users can then immediately take appropriate action, protecting our supply chain and reducing risk to the business. Without ingredients or packaging materials, production stops,” said van der Gaag.

Whatever the result of a transmission, the document is available for easy storage and viewing in standard PDF format. Notifications also automatically updates CCM, and therefore the ERP system, with the results of the transmission, providing greater transparency across the entire ordering process.

“Our users have really welcomed the insight that OpenText provides. They trust the solution, unlike in the past where the default position was exactly the opposite. If the user doesn’t receive an email, they know that their fax has been successfully sent and they need take no further action,” said van der Gaag.

Rapid return on investment

When considering new solutions, Bakkersland has a standard corporate target of a three-year return on investment (ROI). When calculating the business case for Notifications, hard savings were taken into account, including the cost of the fixed ISDN lines and hardware maintenance.

“Our calculations showed that the ROI of the OpenText Notifications solution would be just one-and-a-half years, half that of our corporate target of three years. However, it’s not just the monetary savings, but also the confidence the solution has brought, and the reduction in risk to our business,” said van der Gaag.

Contributory factors to the rapid ROI also include the ‘out of the box’ capabilities of the solution. By being able to meet the needs of Bakkersland without expensive and time-consuming customization or coding, the solution is rapidly deployable.

Handling queries with ease

If a query with a supplier arises, it’s now a quick and easy task to check the delivery status of an order.

“Being able to see exactly what was sent, by whom and when saves a huge amount of time. This end-to-end process visibility just wasn’t possible in the past. We find we need to make fewer calls to suppliers too, adding further efficiency to the whole ordering process,” said van der Gaag.

Overall, the new solution is meeting the needs of Bakkersland for its outbound fax transmissions. However, the solution has the capability to handle additional communications channels too. Email, voice and SMS text message are all potential channels that are open to Bakkersland should the business need arise.

“We set out to lower our costs, provide greater reliability and visibility and reduce risk to the business,” said van der Gaag. “We’ve achieved all of that and more with users’ time being better spent on other tasks.”