EDI integrated, effort reduced: Digital processes at Kerbl

Albert Kerbl GmbH is an internationally active production and trading company headquartered in Buchbach and Ampfing, with sales offices in Austria and France. Across Europe, it offers a uniquely broad, powerful, and constantly trend-adapted range of accessories for animal breeding and husbandry. Whether in Europe, Australia, Russia, South Africa, the USA, or Saudi Arabia – Albert Kerbl GmbH products enjoy worldwide recognition.

Until now, Albert Kerbl GmbH had managed electronic data interchange (EDI) with the help of an external service provider. Invoices and reminders were still being sent by conventional mail. When the obligation for digital signature of documents was removed, the company set out to find a solution that would not only support EDI document exchange but also enable fully automated dispatch of documents via e-mail. The declared objective: to make full use of the know-how of its in-house development team and reduce dependency on external providers. In addition, many of Kerbl’s customers – including major corporations such as Dehner, Amazon, BayWa, and Fressnapf – require electronic data interchange as a prerequisite for supplier approval. This is exactly where the Yaveon solution comes in.

What Kerbl needed was a solution fully integrated into Dynamics NAV, one that offered standardized implementation for a wide variety of partners while remaining flexible enough to align with the company’s own custom extensions of the system. Yaveon is an end-to-end solution that meets all these requirements. Over the years and NAV versions, Kerbl’s ERP system had grown and been optimized to its specific needs – making integration a complex task.

“The expertise at Yaveon is outstanding, and the solution met our high expectations exactly,” explains Florian Wandinger. “We also looked at simple modular systems that could only cover basic requirements. Yaveon, however, provides a top solution that also allows us to implement more complex requirements. Plus, it gives us the option to integrate our own developments very easily,” says Wandinger, highlighting the scalability of Yaveon.

Wandinger also emphasizes both the professional and the personal collaboration:

“At the end of the day, the same applies here as everywhere else in life – you have to get to know each other first. After a short familiarization period, the spark quickly jumped between us and our consultant, and from then on, we were able to communicate openly and transparently. The support was consistently competent and solution-oriented. We wouldn’t want to be without the Yaveon consultants anymore!”

But Albert Kerbl also makes use of the solution beyond standard formats. Smaller customers often do not have the option of sending standardized formats such as EDIFACT. In this case, orders were provided as simple CSV files. Thanks to the uniform framework, these documents are processed without any programming. With Yaveon’s support, Kerbl created a mapping to import the documents. Once this is done, the data is validated and processed as usual. The external format is secondary here. This means that even flat files or XML documents can be exchanged without any problems.

The Yaveon industry ERP solution has proven to be a true success factor when it comes to working efficiently: two years after implementation, Albert Kerbl GmbH now works largely independently with the Yaveon solution. The starting point was the setup of e-mail dispatch. Today, sales documents such as reminders, invoices, order confirmations, and credit notes are preferably sent electronically. For reminders alone, process automation has already reached 99%.

In Germany alone, more than 300,000 documents have been sent using the solution. For this reason, e-mail dispatch is now being gradually rolled out to the French and Austrian entities as well. “For our sales employees, this is of course a fantastic improvement. The time and cost savings achieved through automation are enormous. Our customers also benefit from e-mail dispatch. They now automatically receive a breakdown of upcoming direct debits – something that has been very well received. Setting up e-mail dispatch was done quickly and easily,” says Florian Wandinger enthusiastically.

The deputy head of IT at Albert Kerbl GmbH adds: “For our company, combining job creation and preservation with the ongoing optimization of business processes is the ideal way to stay in step with the times and provide the right momentum.” Already, a large number of EDI partners (in several entities) that were previously converted by an external service provider have been replaced and are now processed directly in Dynamics NAV without detours. Albert Kerbl GmbH placed particular importance on connecting the systems independently – something made possible by both the in-house technical expertise and the simplicity of the Yaveon solution.