Pricelist routines turned into a blast from the past by Caverion

Pricelist routines turned into a blast from the past by Caverion

Caverion and Codento, using Google Cloud tools, put an end to the regular manual checks of tens of thousands of price list lines and the tedious copying in Excel.

Caverion serves its European customers throughout the lifecycle of buildings, infrastructure, and industrial plants and processes. The company’s services cover everything from installation and maintenance of base and smart technologies to managed services, advisory and engineering services, and digital solutions.

Transforming the built environment into a smart and responsible one requires extensive collaboration within Caverion’s supply chain with suppliers such as wholesalers and manufacturers. Dealing with these partners must be smooth, seamless, and error-free to meet the needs of end customers and ensure the success of Caverion’s own business.

Tens of thousands of price list lines every month

Jaakko Nissilä is a Development Manager at Caverion, responsible for developing procurement processes. “We needed a new and faster tool to replace our outdated solution for handling the purchase price lists of our material suppliers. New price lists come at different cycles, every one, three, or twelve months, and at worst, they can be tens of thousands of lines long,” Nissilä describes.

Previously, comparing suppliers’ price lists to previous versions or Caverion’s agreements was manual work. After the comparisons, category managers would still check the results one by one. Finally, the information was manually copied into files, which could be transferred to Caverion’s SAP ERP system.

“Anyone who has copied Excel columns from one place to another knows that it leads to errors, wastes time, and often also nerves,” Nissilä notes. Therefore, Caverion sought a solution to ease the work of those involved in the process and free up their time for more essential tasks.

Automated Supplier price list tool as a Service

Codento implemented an automated price list application for Caverion’s procurement organization. The web application, based on Google Cloud tools, identifies differences in price lists compared to previous versions, detects significant deviations and possible conflicts with existing agreements, and performs the needed checks. According to the pre-defined processing rules, the application finally constructs files from the price list data, which can be directly imported into SAP.

“Feedback from the application’s users has been positive,” says Jaakko Nissilä. He also praises how the comparison data and files, previously scattered across different employees’ computers, are now in a shared cloud service and thus provide everyone with a unified view of the progress of the verification work.

Professional and smooth collaboration 

Caverion had two options for renewing the procurement price list handling: a ready-made solution available on the market and an implementation offered by Codento based on Google Cloud tools.

Codento had previously developed solutions for automating data-intensive processes and validating customer data for other Caverion units. This development work had been utilized, for example, in managing sales pricelists in Caverion’s service unit. Based on these previous experiences, Nissilä and his colleagues chose Codento as a partner and Google Cloud as the application platform. The high cost of the ready-made solution also supported this decision.

Codento delivers the application to Caverion in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, which includes the application, reselling the related Google Cloud licenses, and the development and maintenance of the application. “The operational costs of this solution are minimal for us,” says Jaakko Nissilä. Nissilä also praises the collaboration with Codento as professional and smooth.

Reselling the related Google Cloud licenses.

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