Ratingen, Germany, 30 November 2010. There is a great deal of time pressure in the logistics industry, so every haulage company would welcome a reduction in its workload when it comes to daily administrative tasks like the filling out of forms. At Knauf Gips KG in Iphofen (Germany), a solution has been found to put an end to the paper chaos in the shipping department of 12 plants. Today, the drivers electronically sign summarised delivery reports on a signature pad. The introduction of the SignoSign/Logistic industry solution from signotec has saved this manufacturer of building materials and systems around 770,000 sheets of paper annually, which translates to €95,000 in toner, paper, scanning and other administrative costs. Furthermore, the workload of the internal scanning department has been significantly reduced.

Haulage operations accrue large quantities of electronic receipts every day – for example, when loading goods – including delivery and transport notes as well as receipt confirmations, which must be signed by various people. The logistics centre of Knauf Gips KG in Iphofen sees 220 trucks a day, each one of which loads between one and ten deliveries for a variety of customers. For the driver, this means signing up to ten delivery notes for Knauf, receiving ten more, and bringing these to the customer along with the receipt forms.
 
“The customer documents are still printed out for the driver, but we were urgently looking for a solution to process the internal delivery notes electronically,” explains Thomas Keim, IT coordinator at Knauf Gips KG. The aim was to reduce both the high annual printing costs and the number of paper records. Furthermore, by immediately making the signed delivery notes available in SAP, the company also wanted to make its transport processes more transparent in order to be able to react faster to customer inquiries.

Special signature solution for the logistics industry
The company therefore opted to introduce SignoSign/Logistic, an industry version of the digital signature solution SignoSign that has been tailored to meet the specific needs of logistics providers. The solution is ideal for manually signing large batches of documents and is controlled exclusively via the signature pad. A standalone installation is carried out in the Windows System Tray, which means it is not necessary to change existing software. The solution was adapted to suit the specific needs of Knauf Gips KG.

770,000 printouts fewer each year
By using the digital signature pad, Knauf Gips KG has eliminated 400,000 delivery note printouts at its Iphofen head office alone. This figure increases to 770,000 when including all sites using the solution. “SAP printers are expensive, the toner and maintenance costs alone are high enough,” says Thomas Keim. In addition to printing costs, the company also was able to decrease the manual workload involved in gathering and scanning the documents. This visibly reduced the workload of the archiving department. And the drivers are pleased at having to do less paperwork. Little by little, Knauf Gips KG has supplied the SignoSign/Logistic solution to 12 of its sites. It has only been introduced in the largest plants, which deal with pallet loads. “We started introducing the solution in plants where small teams have to process a large number of trucks, because that’s where this kind of solution is particularly helpful,” explains Thomas Keim. Every day, 550 trucks (220 in the parent plant and a further 330 in other plants using the signature solution) can now be processed faster and more efficiently. Knauf Gips KG also operates many plants that only deliver container and silo goods. The company aims to automate shipping in these plants in the long term, and the Signotec solution is also to be integrated into this plan in a modified form.