Café de Coral Holdings Limited

“We now enjoy the reduction of administrative work and speeding up in supply chain procedures with ezTRADE. Despite massive number of document, the working process is now extensively streamlined between Café de Coral and the suppliers.”

-- Mr. Ivan Ng, General Manager (Supply Chain)

Challenge

Until 2 years ago, Café de Coral (CdC) had to input and validate, manually every day, a massive number of paper delivery notes, payments and invoices. On average CdC staff might take up to 30 minutes to endorse all the paper invoices against the goods receipt data for each single supplier. Obviously, such a process is not only time-consuming but also prone to human errors sometimes. Suppliers, on the other hand, were unclear about CdC’s invoice handling and settlement status, giving rise to unnecessary mis-communication – and misunderstanding - between the parties.

Since then, CdC adopted ezTRADE, a B2B e-commerce platform based on GS1 EANCOM/EDIFACT standard, which enables electronic information exchange between the company and its trading partners every step along the supply chain.

GS1 standards used or solution (s) / service (s) applied Global Location Number (GLN) EANCOM ezTRADE

Solutions

More than 100 major suppliers are now using ezTRADE to receive CdC electronic purchaser order, sending electronic advance shipment notice (ASN) and invoice, which accounts for over 40% of CdC’s total invoice lines.

The ASN, a document that provides detailed information about a pending delivery, helps CdC to be fully prepared to accept delivery. Once accepted, the ASN will automatically populate an invoice number and the received quantity for confirmation of the goods receipt. CdC staff now needs only 39 seconds on average, compared to 112 seconds before, to complete this process, reducing drastically two-third of the time spent for each branch.

Suppliers can then submit electronic invoices through ezTRADE, which would automatically undergo a pre-validation process, so that any non-compliant invoices are filtered out and only the compliant ones accepted into CdC’s backend system.

With the adoption of the ezTRADE solution, CdC staff took only 5 minutes (previously 30 minutes) to verify and approve payment for each supplier, a significant six-fold gain in efficiency. CdC staff can approve the invoices by batches because of improved invoice quality pre-validated by the platform.

For suppliers, they can easily ascertain whether an invoice is accepted or rejected and its relevant justification from the 24x7 ezTRADE platform, thus enabling CdC and suppliers to take remedial actions swiftly to address any deviation. It has not only greatly enhanced CdC’s operation efficiency and accuracy, but also assured a frictionless supplier management system.

The success of the implementation has offered CdC much confidence to plan ahead – for expansion to engage another 80 suppliers in the system in 2019. The subsidiary brands under Café de Coral Holdings are also adopting the solution.

Benefits

Café de Coral is able to enjoy the following benefits with the use of ezTRADE:

1. Reduce almost two-third of manpower hours in goods receipt data entry;
2. 6 times enhanced manpower efficiency in terms of data validation between goods receipts and invoice, and enhanced greater data accuracy;
3. More agile responses can be provided in case of problematic invoice or any discrepancy;
4. Increase visibility of invoice handling status for suppliers.

About the Company

Established in 1968, Café de Coral Holdings Limited is now one of Asia’s largest publicly listed restaurant and catering groups, is principally engaged in operating quick-service (QSR) and casual dining. The Group is also a major operator in institutional catering and food processing business.  With over 450 outlets in Hong Kong and the Mainland, its brand portfolio includes Café de Coral Fast Food, Super Super Congee and Noodles, The Spaghetti House, Oliver’s Super Sandwiches, Shanghai Lao Lao, Mixian Sense, etc.