ERP system with consistency

The manufacturer of plants for drying sewage sludge and plant fibers for animal feed, cleaning plants for the pharmaceutical industry and robots for injection molding plants exports 90 percent of its products abroad. Modern sheet metal processing, mechanical production and the manufacture of screw conveyors complement the plant and apparatus engineering. In addition to flexibility and speed, high product quality and vertical integration are among the advantages of the contract manufacturer.

All-round renewal in EDP
When Dominik Seiler took over the management of S Combi five years ago, the introduction of a modern ERP system was a first measure to increase the efficiency of the operational processes. Today, the company has a software solution that integrates all ERP and PPS application modules and enables complete data continuity from the quotation to production processing with resource planning and purchasing to invoicing and posting to financial accounting. It is able to support the entire breadth of the production spectrum, from plant construction to individual orders for laser cutting and mechanical production, and to integrate subsystems such as time recording and industry-specific costing software. In addition, raw materials, semi-finished products and finished parts can be managed via the warehouse program, replacing the previous Excel lists and enabling employees to find the material they need more quickly today. In addition, the production management is automatically informed about the work progress of the production orders.

Efficiency for the rapping and plant engineering business
Individual orders with laser cutting and bending, which are under enormous cost pressure, account for 20 percent of S Combi's sales. Therefore, it is essential for S Combi to process these individual orders with the same Abacus program as the plant orders without much effort, reports Seiler. For this purpose, two so-called dummy articles were created in the article master data for a set of metal sheets as well as individual laser parts, which can always be used for a quickly created quotation and subsequent order processing. With the Abacus software, considerably more laser orders per time unit can now be processed via the system.

In the case of plant orders, on the other hand, correct articles are created in the master in order to ensure traceability back to the materials and qualities used. Today, the program offers employees the required transparency about the various processes and the respective production status. Since the production away from home is also managed as a work step in the Abacus program and the time feedback is booked online via the integrated PDA system, they always know where which article is located and by when a work step will be completed. This simplifies the planning of subsequent work, for which the graphical plan manager of the Abacus PPS software is used.

Working times of individual production steps are recorded with the time recording solution ADMIA and written back online to the PPS production order via a web service. In this way, it is possible to see in Abacus when a job has been completed. This combination is super, enthuses Seiler. Supplier invoices and the entire order dossier are digitized with AbaScan and archived in the software. Quality assurance benefits from the fact that sketches, plans and welding drawings can be stored electronically in the same dossier as the order confirmation.

As a result, S Combi now has a system in the form of Abacus software that supports the company's further development and allows orders to be processed much more efficiently than before, thanks to the lower administrative outlay.