For more than three decades, Metal Tech MFG has been precision-machining components for many of the world’s best-known agricultural machinery brands. We work with large enterprises with manufacturing facilities all over the world—and when we receive an order, we strive to deliver high-quality products on time, every time.
Because we work with tight timelines for manufacturing and delivery, communication is key. We need to be able to receive orders from our customers and let them know when to expect delivery of their products. With thousands of orders coming in every month, we depend on our electronic data interchange (EDI) capabilities to stay on top of the workload.
Although EDI has been a vital capability for our business for decades, our previous approach still involved a signficant amount of manual data processing. Creating and dispatching advance shipping notices (ASNs) to our customers was a full-time job—one of our employees worked 40 hours a week simply re-keying data on customer orders.
In a small company like ours, everyone needs to wear multiple hats to get things done. We wanted to free our people from repetitive data-entry tasks, so they could focus on value-added work.
Getting into the fast lane with EDI automation
To achieve our goal, we looked for a way to automate our EDI workflows, beginning with ASN documents. Initially, we thought we would need to rip and replace our legacy ERP system to get the B2B integration capabilities we wanted—a major project that would have involved a massive outlay of capital and time, and a signficant amount of risk. But then, OpenText came through with another option.
When OpenText showed us what we could do with OpenText Business Network Cloud Foundation, we quickly realized that we had a fast route to advanced EDI automation. Working with OpenText Professional Services, we deployed a solution to extract the necessary data from our ERP system and bring it into Business Network Cloud Foundation for onward processing.
Shifting to B2B managed services
Every month, we use Business Network Cloud Foundation to process up to 3,000 EDI transactions—including all our ASNs. The platform leverages the world’s largest value-added network (the OpenText Trading Grid™ Messaging Service), which gives us total peace of mind that all our EDI documents will be delivered to customers on time.
In the rare event that there’s an issue with one of our ASNs, OpenText Lens™ gives us the ability to monitor our business transaction flows in real time and rapidly drill down to discover and resolve the root cause.
Empowering employees to add value
Even though we’ve automated the processing of just one of our EDI documents, the project has already made a big difference to our business. One of our team-members who was previously working up to 40 hours a week manually re-keying order data for ASNs is now free to focus on more valuable and rewarding work: from training the next generation of machinists to refining our processes on the shop floor.
Working with OpenText has also helped us significantly reduce our costs. Thanks to the labor savings we made, the project paid for itself within a year. We plan to work with OpenText to automate all of our EDI processes, which has the potential to deliver cost-savings of around $200,000 a year.
Although cost-savings are welcome, what excites us most about EDI automation is the ability to save time and focus on our customers. By taking manual data entry out of the equation, we reduce the potential for human error in our B2B communications, which translates to even faster and higher-quality services for our customers.
To learn more about how we are working with OpenText to transform our approach to EDI, read the Metal Tech MFG customer case study.
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