Kinnarps saves money with e-business
Kinnarps offers interior design solutions for public and office environments. With high quality products and a low environmental cost, the company manages the whole chain – from raw material to ready-made solution for the office space. Today, Kinnarps is the third largest furniture manufacturer in Europe with sales offices in roughly 35 countries. The group has 2 200 employees and a total turnover of 3,5 billion SEK.
For a large international production company like Kinnarps, there is an enormous saving potential in automating the purchasing processes. Every day, hundreds of items are ordered from hundreds of suppliers. By digitizing the order and invoice administration towards the five major suppliers, Kinnarps has saved a lot of valuable time. The Purchasing department may now focus on more important things, such as smart logistics and efficient stockholding.
Two years ago, Kinnarps initiated a pilot project to rationalize the purchasing process by automating order and invoice administration towards suppliers. To make sure that the system worked, the pilot involved only one supplier. Since Kinnarps already used iCore Business Server, the IT department could easily build a new solution based on iCore Process Server.
Basically it is all about saving time for all parties invoved in the purchasing process. With a higher degree of automation, we can spend time on more important things, such as streamlining our inventory, says Tomas Bäckman from the Purchasing department at Kinnarps.
Tomas Bäckman, Purchase at Kinnarps
Now, the company is able to send suppliers a forecast of expected purchases up to 80 days in advance. This means that the suppliers also can plan in advance and the forecasts are accurate in 95 percent of the cases. When an order has been confirmed by Kinnarps the ordered products are automatically removed from the forecast and placed in the ERP system Movex. This solution simplifies the purchasing process, which also satisfies the suppliers.
Kinnarps negotiates individual price and product directories with each supplier. The directories are then placed in the ERP system at Kinnarps, where iCore automatically updates the prices in all orders to be sent.
The invoice matching function in iCore Process Server is also very useful. Before, it sometimes happened that a supplier made the mistake of sending the same order line on two different invoices. This cannot happen anymore, since iCore will immediately send an alarm if the same order line is invoiced twice.
Invoice matching is important. Anyone could make a mistake and it is good to have a system that will discover human errors. The best thing about the whole solution is that I do not nees to worry about the technology at all. I make a request and our IT department will try to solve it together with iCore. So far it has worked well.
Today, the solution from iCore covers approximately 25 percent of the purchasing turnover and the goal at Kinnarps is to continue rationalizing the process. By focusing on a few big suppliers, which will be integrated using iCore, Kinnarps plan to save even more time and money. Soon, digitalized order and invoice administration will comprise 60 percent of the turnover in the Purchasing department.