80% Time Savings in Supplier Management Through Digitalization

SONAX GMBH

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🏗  Industry:                          Chemicals (Focus: Automotive Industry)

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🗺  Headquarters:         Neuburg an der Donau (Bavaria)

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🧍  Employees:                      ~ 420

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👥  Procurement Staff:    20

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💵  Revenue                                 ~ $144M per year

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For 70 years, SONAX has stood for a strong brand in car care and develops and produces nearly all of its cleaning and care products in-house in Neuburg. SONAX GmbH is part of the Hoffmann Group and has a 100% subsidiary: DuroDruck GmbH. Starting as a pioneer in car care, SONAX has now also become a premium product manufacturer in the bicycle and caravan industries. The company has also expanded into additional markets, including agriculture, forestry, and construction. SONAX is positioned as the German and Austrian market leader in its industry and continuously works on new solutions, applications, and products for its customers.

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"We didn't need a tool that requires 100 hours of investment – we needed 'Plug & Play' – and that is 100% what Tacto delivers." - Dr. Burghart, Chief Procurement Officer

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Initial Situation and Challenges:

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In 2015, Dr. Burghart, Chief Procurement Officer at SONAX GmbH, set the goal of automating and digitalizing procurement processes at SONAX. Electronic procurement was intended to significantly reduce the existing time spent on manual tasks and create more room for strategic projects and topics in procurement.

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As a company in the chemical industry, SONAX places particularly high demands on its suppliers, which must be met for compliance reasons. These include, among others, a Code of Conduct or certain ISO certifications that suppliers must always keep up to date. SONAX had to conduct these inquiries manually with over 300 suppliers (together with the Hoffmann Group, even over 400 suppliers) through the "back-and-forth" of emails. On top of that, individual General Purchasing Conditions (GPCs) had to be sent to suppliers via email. As a result, the email inboxes of procurement staff were flooded!

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The various inquiry statuses were documented in a very extensive Excel spreadsheet. The inquiry status was noted using a color-coding system. Archived in the electronic file organizer (ELO), the data then had to be entered into the ERP system in order to finally be able to generate reports from the ERP system. This process was not only characterized by massive time expenditure but also carried the risk of errors in the ERP system.

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Since SONAX's heavily utilized IT department had virtually no spare resources, only the introduction of system-side support that required minimal IT resources was possible. For a long time, however, no suitable tool could be found for SONAX that could handle the multitude of existing processes simply and without significant effort for IT and staff.

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3 Needs and Challenges SONAX Wanted to Overcome

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Automate and digitalize manual and recurring tasks related to supplier inquiries for various certificates (CoC, ISO, REACH, etc.)

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Free up capacity in procurement to focus on strategic projects

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Lean tool implementation and process automation without involving IT

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‍Tacto as THE Solution

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And then came Tacto: Finally a tool with which the transformation to electronic procurement could succeed. The digitalization of core processes along supplier management and increased data transparency could be implemented within just a few weeks after a quick and easy implementation. Tacto is a perfect fit for SONAX's requirements and, in contrast to other tools, was able to keep the IT effort very low.

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"We didn't need a tool that requires 100 hours of investment – we needed 'Plug & Play' – and that is 100% what Tacto delivers."

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Tacto makes it possible to view all supplier information in one centralized location, providing an overview and transparency across the volume of data. Additionally, a wide variety of supplier inquiries, from Code of Conduct to all types of ISO certifications, could be fully automated. Comprehensive automation means that all steps from sending out inquiries to reminders for suppliers are covered by Tacto. SONAX estimates the time savings achieved compared to the previous manual supplier inquiry process at 80%.

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The implementation of Tacto went smoothly and without effort. IT only had to spend 10 minutes to provide the data. The procurement team is also enthusiastic about Tacto and describes the tool as "user-friendly, simple & relieving." The use of Tacto at SONAX so far shows that suppliers adopt the tool very well and also benefit from the high user-friendliness. Their consistently positive feedback particularly emphasizes the simplicity of use.

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"One link and an email address – then I was already signed up, super uncomplicated." - Mr. Demirtas, Key User Tacto

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3 Successes with Tacto:

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80% time savings through digitalization of supplier inquiries and certificate management as well as reminder functions

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Highly intuitive usability across all user levels

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Creating room for strategic procurement topics through massive time savings in supplier management

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The Collaboration with Tacto

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The collaboration with Tacto is characterized by transparency, honesty, and dynamism. SONAX particularly values the clear information about the individual modules and features of Tacto. As soon as Tacto announces a new feature, it can be implemented right away. Proactively and dynamically, Tacto works together with SONAX on sending out supplier inquiries and identifies further optimization potential.

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"What I particularly liked is that Tacto said from the very beginning that the company wants to learn from our requirements to further develop Tacto, so we can grow together."

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For occasional uncertainties, Tacto's customer support is always available and immediately addresses the issue so that it can be resolved promptly.

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"Once I didn't know where the current inquiry was – our contact person was immediately on hand and could help me right away."

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A Look into the Future

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SONAX looks very positively at the shared future with Tacto. In the medium term, the goal is to further increase the massive time savings and invest the freed-up time in strategic topics.

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"We see great potential to expand the use of Tacto."

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In the long term, SONAX wants to develop risk management applications for procurement together with Tacto. Procurement risks should be captured in the tool going forward. This would allow a significant portion of the current organizational effort in the procurement department to be handled through Tacto.

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Many thanks to Dr. Burghart, Mr. Demirtas, and the entire team at SONAX for our collaborative and trusted partnership.

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Through partners and customers like you, it is possible to continuously develop our product in close exchange and close to daily operations, as well as to discuss the topics that concern industrial mid-market procurement in joint webinars.

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Learn how SONAX was able to achieve up to 80% time savings in supplier management and other operational processes (supplier inquiries, reminder functions, etc.) using Tacto.