Complaint Cockpit for the TecCom B2B Platform

TecCom was founded in 2000 by a group of European Automotive companies. Members of this group are e.g. Bosch, Continental, Hella and TMD Friction. TecCom serves as an e-commerce provider in the free spare parts market of the automotive branch for as well wholesalers as small garages.

Starting Situation

With its Business-to-Business application TecOrder, TecCom provides a high-performance platform for order entry processing. It is used by around 13.000 dealers for more than 10 millions of requests and order items monthly at over 350 merchants or trade marks, respectively (As of June 2011).


Via this system all processes within an order can be mapped, e.g. availability queries, express orders or transmission of invoices. Thereby order processing is simplified and the administration effort is reduced. Most errors made at order entry thus can be avoided and consequently there are less incorrect deliveries. All participants of the automotive aftermarket use a common solution. Existing ERP systems can be retained and included, on customer as well as on supplier side.


However the system was missing a complaints handling so far. If a wrong or demaged part was received, the customer could not report to the supplier automatedly. Instead, a hotline or field reps were contacted or the goods had been returned without prior notification. Such returns often could not be assigned correctly and consequently quite often delays and long waiting times occured, until finally the correct and undemaged replacement arrived at the customer site.
There was obviously an urgent need to eliminate the manual proccessing in the over all complaint process.

Implementation

Hence TecCom started the development of TecReturns. To this clavis has been contracted to map and implement the single processing steps into the SAP system.
For suppliers and customers already use their own ERP systems, it was important to ensure that the new components fit into the existing structures.


It soon became clear that at the companies involved the complaint process war included in different areas of the SAP system. Some companies focus on quality assessment, e.g. it is questioned why a spare part is reported as damaged: Is it wear or a case of transport damage? Is it material defect that results from an inaccuracy in the process of work or was the raw material already defective. Once the sources of error are identified, they are to be rectified. Any essential business process dealing with error analysis and prevention, process optimisation or quality control in each of the company areas involved, is controlled by the SAP module QM (Quality Management). In other companies financial aspects of complaints like credits or cancellation of billings are important. Here the processes are mapped into the SAP module SD (Sales and Distribution).


Therefore clavis together with the company runtime developed a central complaint cockpit. runtime's part was the web application for complaint entries. clavis was responsible for the SAP application to process the data entered in the web front-end. All informations gathered in the event of a complaint are collected in this cockpit: Informations from SD concerning invoicing and such from QM referring to quality are put together in one claim.
The system is consequently capable of creating all types of order, a pure credit memo request (without further material flow) or an return order incl. the follow-up processes (goods entry, bar code scan, etc.) as well.

 

The application offers additionally the following advantages:

  • Diagnostics Functionality
    In cases where a QM module was lacking, a spare part supplier now can display and follow up findings and error analysis with help of this system.
  • Attachments
    File attachments (e.g. fotos) can be added to complaint notes.
  • Processing Status
    The customer receives status reports on the progress of his specific complaint.
  • Label Printing
    For return shipments a shipment label can be created by the system. This label contains all informations needed by the manufacturer to clearly identify the return.
  • Sample Logic
    Returns and complaints can be examined by use of a particular logic, e.g. goods value starting from, or a striking accumulation of complaints.

The Effect

TecReturns is a useful supplement to TecOrder. With the transparent and user-friendly processing of complaints a significant reduction of costs and efforts is achieved. Complaints are additionally handled faster and thus the acceptance of the entire platform increases at suppliers and merchants as well as the satisfaction of the end customer.