Comarch EDI at Man Truck & Bus SE| Case Study ⚐ Comarch

Global EDI Project

In 2020, MAN chose Comarch as its global service provider for digitizing outgoing invoices.

Meant to harmonize and centralize services that were previously rendered by several different providers, the project also aims at increasing controllability in order to systematically support the automation process and at reducing costs by exploiting synergy effects. The project is being managed centrally and local customer managers are involved in its implementation, which bolsters customer retention and facilitates the collective achievement of project goals through observance of best practices.

The primary criterion that lead to Comarch being chosen as provider was the IT company’s capacity to ensure compliance with the numerous different national laws regulating the electronic exchange of data in general and of invoice data both on a business and technical level. Depending on MAN’s needs, further message types (such as delivery notes) can be implemented in addition to invoices. In order to make this happen, Comarch is migrating the solutions of preceding providers, integrating all document types into the central EDI system.

Furthermore, various types of partners are being onboarded to the EDI system and connected with MAN. This involves integration with government e-invoicing platforms, ministries of finance, and MAN’s service providers as well as the implementation of direct electronic data interchange with private companies and workshops. It was therefore particularly important that Comarch be able to implement all technical interfaces and document formats on demand - whether in their default versions or customized. With the help of Comarch EDI, MAN has been able to make daily operations easier and to significantly reduce the administrative effort.

Another important aspect of the project are the high security standards required by MAN Truck & Bus SE, or rather by the German Association of the Automotive Industry, that Comarch is able to fulfill.

The early stages of the project already brought the first major success: Comarch was able to come up with a solution for integrating a special type of VAT levied on used truck parts in the German e-invoicing standard XRechnung. The solution originally proposed by KoSIT (the developers of XRechnung) for dealing with the tax in question had been found to contradict their very own validation rules, resulting in all electronic invoices containing the VAT in question being rejected by Germany’s central e-invoicing platforms. In order to enable MAN to indicate the tax correctly while remaining compliant with the authorities’ validation rules, Comarch’s project team developed a new workaround for this industry-specific case.