SAP INFO - February 2004

Length Times Width Equals Complexity
Polyester and fiberglass product manufacturer deploys total SAP solution

Contact: OSCo Consulting GmbH Mannheim, Germany

By implementing a fully integrated SAP system, Johns Manville Europe has controlled and shortened production cycles and reduced errors. The SAP solution also facilitates quick reaction to a dynamic market and enables the company to show “one face” to the customer.

Running smoothly and ceaselessly, machines on the shop floor churn out endless lengths of white fabric. The fibers appear to be identical, but in fact up to 1,000 different materials come off the production lines. Johns Manville Europe (JME), located in Wertheim am Main, Germany, is a worldwide provider of products ranging from raw materials for roofing membranes through industrial filtration devices, ceiling panels, sports equipment, fiberglass wall coverings, and carpeting, to glass fibers for wind turbines.

JME’s strengths are its ability to provide high-quality products and its flexibility in meeting customer specifications. “We generate most of our revenue from a few major customers because we give priority to responding to their demands individually,” stresses Rainer Hess, head of IT applications at JME. This philosophy, along with recent acquisitions, has led the company to expand rapidly over the last few years.

The advantage for JME is that its product portfolio had broadened; the disadvantage is that its IT landscape has grown in complexity. The legacy system couldn’t cope with the numerous interfaces, lack of data synchronization, poor overview, and inflexibility. The old software has had its day. “We had a production control system that worked perfectly, but it just wasn’t adaptable enough, “ recalls Hess.

Integrating a new machine into the existing solution took “at least 150 man days,” estimates Mario Hecker, IT engineer at JME. Following implementation of the integrated SAP landscape, “we can easily do the job in 25 man days, “he adds.

Total changeover

This factor alone justified the decision to change over completely to SAP, says Wolfgang Seehaus, managing director of SAP Services Partner OSCo GmbH in Mannheim, Germany, which collaborated with the JME IT team to design the blueprint and implement the project. At first, the IT managers at Johns Manville Europe viewed the plan with misgivings, but their skeptism proved unfounded.

JME now has a comprehensive IT platform for financial accounting, controlling, and materials management, based on SAP R/3 in conjunction with the OSCo solution. Enhanced by mySAP Supply Chain Management (mySAP SCM) for production planning, warehouse management, and logistics, as well as SAP Business Warehouse for analysis and reporting, the solution now offers complete data and user integration.

All areas of production and sales logistics, including enhanced plant data collection and material tracking, are integrated in a seamless management reporting system on a cross-plant basis. This enables the Wertheim plant to do all the work scheduling for a number of other JME affiliates. Inventory; manufacturing output; product quality; incoming orders; short-, mid-, and long-term capacities; order volume; plan attainment levels; workloads; contribution margins; and many other functions are modeled in the system, providing transparency at all levels.

The solutions are based on SAP variant configuration and SAP for Mill Products – giving JME a complete overview of sales and production on figures. The controlling staff is also happy. “They can now access complete, accurate data whenever they want to without additional effort,” says Hecker. This enables management to respond quickly and effectively to new market requirements at both operational and strategic levels.

To achieve a sustained increase in production flexibility, it is not enough to streamline the back office. For this reason, each machine has its own PC terminal to monitor, plan, and, if necessary, adjust production processes.

“The input screens are designed so that using the system is simple, quick and error free,” explains Seehaus. This minimizes the need for training. Since the same system runs on all terminals, shift and staff changeovers take place smoothly,” Absolutely everything is integrated in plant data collection,” Hess continues, including consumption quantities, qualities, times, change to storage locations goods issues, metering, and receipts from internal or external procurement.

Comprehensive quality control

Gaining an edge over competitors requires going that extra mile. Thorough quality controls plus fast access to reliable data mean that JME can provide individual quality assurance certificates for every package. Continuous checks throughout the production process track the production time and location of every batch. Labeling and bar code identification systems are integrated into the SAP system, enabled by the quality management and warehouse management functions. “Production conditions aren’t constant; quality is dependent on many factors, such as air humidity or temperature,” explains Hess, “so we need to keep an eye on up to 20 characteristics for different fibers.”

The decision to implement SAP was the right one, Hess says. The American parent company is both impressed and satisfied. “We have been working with the new solution for quite a while and there have been no complaints,” Hess notes.

The system’s flexibility and enhancement capabilities are propelling JME toward its goal of becoming market leader. “Even creating material master data only takes a few mouse clicks, “says Hecker. With over 1,000 different data records per year this is a very important function. “You generally allow three days to set up a material master. As a manufacturer of many different products, the new solution gives us an enormous advantage over the competition,” he notes, adding that “having data that’s one hundred percent reliable gives us much greater agility in the marketplace.”

“We managed to convert the whole system with virtually no production downtime – and all within the scheduled time frame and on budget, “says Hess, playing tribute to the successful collaboration with SAP and OSCo.