Over the years the Abaca customer base has grown such that many of its customers now trade with each other, most notably in the case of sheet feeders trading with a number of sheet plants. A new business to business interface allows customers to send orders directly into the systems of suppliers who are also Abaca customers. The Abaca suite is already popular with a host of UK sheet plants, but it is also enjoying considerable success in South Africa, where Abaca has recently added Seyfert’s Cape Town sheet plant to its list of clients. Importantly, a key Seyfert supplier, one of two Cape Town sheet feeding plants known since the demerger from Mondi as Mpact, is also an Abaca client, and it is fair to say that Seyfert and Mpact are making full use of B2B opportunities.

Graham Dickinson sees this as an important milestone and says, “Seyfert and Mpact have both recognised the administrative savings that can be achieved by using our Business to Business module. The facility to use barcoding for goods receiving and stock control, added to the ability to send orders, acknowledgements and invoices electronically between the businesses, is going to save these companies a good deal of time and money, as well as improving the accuracy of their dealings with each other. We now have on board sheet feeding operations in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg so it's likely that other South African sheet plants will take our software in order to utilise the business to business functionality and remove cost from their companies.” Graham Dickinson tells us more about some of the features of this new development. When an order is sent from a customer’s system to the supplier, any discrepancies such as pricing errors are flagged up when the electronic acknowledgement is sent back by the Abaca system from the supplier to the customer. No paperwork is necessary and no phone calls need to be made — everything is done electronically. The receiving end does not need to process the transactions, which is especially efficient in the case of sheet feeding, because the sales order processing clerk no longer needs to key in the orders from the sheet plant. Finished goods can be barcoded for despatch, with the same label being used to scan the goods into the receiving customers system, eliminating the need for manual checking and recording of incoming materials. Finally, an electronic invoice is generated by the supplier and is automatically matched to the scanned receipts from the bar coding system at the customer’s end, and posted through to the accounting ledger.



Graham Dickinson says, “Using these modules removes the need for any price/quantity checking and posting to ledgers for incoming invoices from the supplier, because the system does it all. There are considerable administrative savings to be made and we expect a huge take-up of this facility from our existing customers, many of whom are dedicated sheet feeders or integrated plants trading with sheet plants.”

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