How Vileda Saved 75 Days of Human Resource in Just Six Months

For over 70 years Vileda has set the standard for innovative cleaning products. Vileda is proud to be a brand of Freudenberg, whose brands also include O-Cedar in the US.

As a highly successful, multinational manufacturing business, Vileda needs to manage complex process flows and operations across its global ecosystem. To improve efficiency and maintain a competitive advantage, they work closely with EDI integration partner eddyson, replacing onerous manual work with clean, streamlined processes that benefit their business, customers, and logistics partners.

Vileda has made huge strides digitizing critical processes. Alongside eddyson, they’ve migrated 100s of global customers to eddyson’s EDI solution, and it’s a journey that never ends. In a continued push for business excellence, Vileda identified that a number of high-value customers still weren’t connected. This was having a significant impact on efficiency and productivity on the business’s frontline.

Specifically, staff within their global Customer Interaction Centers were feeling the impact. When employees received an order from a non-EDI customer, they faced the onerous task of manually entering and emailing a sales order back to them. Each one took up to five minutes to generate. Multiplied across multiple customers in multiple global locations, staff were processing thousands of sales orders this way every month. This snatched vital hours away from the team and diverted staff from the value-added work they love, such as serving and satisfying their customers.

Simultaneously, Vileda was keen to make the workflow between its 3PLs and logistics partners smoother and easier through greater EDI integration. If Vileda could complete these final pieces in their EDI puzzle, they would further improve their operational efficiency and strengthen customer and partner relationships across the world.

To achieve their project objectives faster, Vileda onboarded additional support from eddyson in the form of a dedicated Technical Implementation (TIM) Manager. This gave them a single point of contact—with extensive process integration acumen—to discuss project goals and build an informed roadmap to achieve their goals at the earliest opportunity.

Before they could solve the challenge at hand, Vileda needed to build out a detailed picture of which customers weren’t connected to eddyson’s EDI. In large organizations, aligning departments on strategic initiatives such as this can be incredibly complex and challenging. Vileda streamlined the process by leveraging its newly created Center of Excellence, which is mandated to reduce manual processes across the business. With close collaboration, they were able to align and prioritize the list of customers that needed to be moved from manual processing to full automation.

"Our Center of Excellence ran a survey with our Customer Interaction Centers and established which customers placed large orders that didn’t come through EDI. Then we had regular calls with the center and our upper management to decide which customers to prioritize," as Sebastian explains.

Vileda set about connecting the newly identified customers to eddyson’s EDI in order of operational priority. eddyson accelerated the process using its deep bank of pre-configured connections. Because eddyson works with more than 800 customers in over 60 countries, they’ve already developed profiles for thousands of businesses. So when Vileda requested a profile that eddyson had already developed, they could establish the integration in a matter of hours.

With eddyson’s technology doing the heavy lifting and a dedicated TIM on hand to answer any question, Vileda seamlessly connected 15 of their biggest customers over to eddyson’s EDI in just 6 months.

Vileda also took the opportunity to digitize and streamline processes across their global logistics operations. With eddyson, they integrated all global 3PLs and carriers, ensuring processes were consistent across critical areas such as order processing and management, tracing and tracking shipments, and freight receipts. As a result, Vileda has better stock visibility, reduced manual work and costs, and meets the delivery needs of customers faster.

"Thanks to eddyson, we now have one global approach. In every warehouse around the world, we use the same processes and the same messages. So this has really standardized our global processes," says Sebastian.

Vileda appreciates the added value they received from their dedicated eddyson TIM. With deep knowledge of Vileda’s goals, processes and priorities, they were equipped to answer every question and ensure Vileda’s needs and deadlines were met.

Sebastian says, “Without enabling our eddyson TIM, we wouldn’t have been able to manage this initiative and onboard all of those customers on top of our daily tasks and responsibilities. Our TIM helped us maintain momentum across all the developments and profiles and they were very, very good."