Organization – ZIM Integrated Shipping Services LTD
Sector – Shipping / Maritime Transportation
Problem –Due to special requirements from customers, the company had to generate invoices manually.
Solution – Using InsightZAP (formerly known as InsightSAP) ZIM has created a new automation process that generates the needed invoices and sends them to the customers. Thus, the company saved a lot of time on generating manual invoices.
Background
ZIM is an international shipping company offering carrier services for customers worldwide. The company is highly technical, and its priority is to digitize work processes to provide better services to its clients and partners.
In the case of demurrage invoices, the system generates a PDF invoice sent automatically to the customer. However, the company also has customers who ask that demurrage billing must be sent in Excel format.
The Problem / Pain Point
To comply with the customers’ requirements, ZIM employees had to manually generate invoices and check that the amount on every field was correct. This process was far from ideal, considering the volume of daily invoices users had to send. To make things worse, every customer defined a different Excel template. That means the ZIM team had to double-check they were using the correct template, which slowed down the process even further.
This complicated and time-consuming process needed to be simplified, and the company decided to use InsightZAP to solve this problem. Since all the relevant information was on SAP, creating a process that starts with SAP made sense.
The Solution
ZIM implementers took raw data from SAP DB and used InsightZAP to create a report for every customer. Using different variants, implementers created the reports according to the different requirements of every customer.
For data manipulation, the ZIM team used InsightZAP formulas. Two main changes were made to the reports:
Renaming standard SAP column titles to match the customers’ requirements.
Date / Time formats were set to the customers’ preferences.
Then, the implementers used InsightZAP’s sharing and collaboration tool. They distributed the reports as Excel files by choosing the email address (or addresses) to match each report.
The whole process was done without a single line of code.
Below you can find two screenshots of the system. The first screenshot is a list of reports from InsightZAP. In the second screenshot, you can see the sharing and collaboration features, where implementers can select the report and its format.
Do note that InsightZAP has collaboration settings regarding the recipients of every report. It is possible to select email addresses or phone numbers that will permanently be assigned to the specific report. By automating the recipients, the process was made easier since customers got their invoices without any involvement from the ZIM team.
In Conclusion
ZIM used InsightSAP to create Excel-based invoices that met the requirements of their customers. A task done manually and was very time-consuming is now completely automated. The ZIM SAP team dedicated 150 hours of work to this project without having to write a single line of code. The task took time because of the need to create many different reports to meet the customers’ different needs and requirements.
After completing the project, it became fully automated, and the invoicing team didn’t need to generate and send invoices manually. Moreover, the company’s customers were happy with the results and gave positive feedback.
In short, ZIM SAP implementers used InsightZAP in order to create automated Excel invoices to meet their customers’ requirements. The SAP-based automated process replaced a manual process that was very inefficient. Using InsightZAP, the team could generate the needed reports and send them in Excel format to their customers.