News from Visibility & Analytics, Quality Management, Supply Chain Collaboration and Invoicing

Our development teams have done a great job in the past three months. Here is a summary of the most important new features:

Visibility & Analytics

A new Visibility & Analytics Datahub offers our customers the possibility to “consume” analytics data of any kind very easily and to integrate it into existing reports. Via a generic, high-performance API interface, data can be queried in various payload formats — compressed if desired. Compared to the past, no customer-specific interfaces and data format specifications are required. As a result, implementation is very simple, cost-effective and requires little effort.

The new Delivery Instruction Volatility Report makes it easy to determine the variability of delivery instructions. For example, plants and suppliers that are subject to particularly high fluctuations in call-offs can be identified. Highly and frequently fluctuating delivery call-offs, especially shortly before the delivery date, pose major challenges for suppliers and can lead to declining delivery reliability. The interactive data analysis tool facilitates the visualization of these fluctuations and supports the exchange between the buyer and his supplier about critical delivery call-offs.

Quality Management

The Technical Review solution has incorporated the experiences of many users over the past few months. With this valuable input, the following improvements have been implemented:

• Important additional information can now be documented via the comment function. In addition to the author’s name, the time and date are logged in the comment field, in the cover sheet and in the status report.
• The task function has been optimized. Tasks can now also be created and updated quickly and easily in the overview of tasks.
• To ensure the flow of information within a part-related survey, all team members are now informed by e-mail depending on the status of the questions.
  
  

Supply Chain Collaboration

All processes that were previously presented under WebEDI, Logistics & Finance or SCM can now be found uniformly under Supply Chain Collaboration. A preview version of the new order overview allows users to familiarize themselves with the future more modern and intuitive user interface.

Invoicing

There are two important innovations to the Invoicing solution:

1. an improved search algorithm simplifies the processing of documents for which individual routing information is required – so-called “routing triples”. If a supplier does not know this routing information, documents may be rejected that would not be necessary. The optimized search algorithm now completes the missing information on its own. This reduces rejections and makes the supplier’s daily work easier.
2. a new delete function makes it possible to directly delete documents with the status “error”. This prevents long lists of documents that have not been successfully processed. This significantly increases clarity.

The motto in agile software development according to SAFe is “After PI is before PI!” Therefore, we continue seamlessly into the next sprints. In three months we will publish the results here again.