Roobol Woonwinkels

Roobol is a Rotterdam-based, family-owned, carpeting retailer that has been in business for almost 50 years. The company has established itself as one of the Netherlands' leading carpet retailers. During the last few years, the company has grown to 350 employees and has evolved to 40 wholly owned stores in the Netherlands.

Recently Roobol has successfully implemented EDM: Output Management (Confirm), document management system, to generate picklists and labels which function as routers between the warehouse and its retail distributors.

Problem:
Prior to using Output Management (Confirm), Roobol was relying on manual efforts in generating and printing the picklists and labels. Moreover, the manner in which the records were printed did not coincide with the route in the warehouse. Thus, every morning, employees had to spend time manually correcting this problem by physically tearing out the printed stickers and re-inserting them the correct way. All together, this process took hours because of the multiple steps involved and used manpower which could have been used elsewhere.

Roobol needed a solution that would automate this process with minimal supervision. Output Management (Confirm) was chosen because of the integration with the installed Lawson system and the possibility to trigger reports by a file or a status of a field in the database.

Solution:
Output Management (Confirm) integrated the several reports to three standard lists and stickers. The generation and printing process is now being triggered by just one manual event and takes 30 minutes to complete (instead of 4 hours). The issue with sorting the records also has successfully been solved by Output Management's standard functionality. Additionally, any problem that arises is easily rectified because the process is now less complex and each step is easily identifiable.

Roobol can define within their Lawson system which data has to be printed on which report. Also the reports have the flexibility to sort the printed records in the same order as the route in the warehouse.

This new automated process has earned Roobol savings in real time. This time is now used for additional processes associated with the integration of the retail outlets using Lawson.

Implementation:
"The Output Management (Confirm) implementation process was very satisfying," said Dennis Hanibals, IT Director of Roobol. "In a short time the base functionality was live at Roobol. Some last difficult issues that arose were solved in perfect co-operation with the supplier. Help was available when we needed it and there was full co-operation with Roobol to make this a successful implementation from start to finish."