Reduced costs thanks to stabilized EWM system
Customer: Leading manufacturer of paper and film packaging
Project duration: 6 months
Our customer:
The company is one of the leading manufacturers of paper and film packaging in Europe. For more than a century, the company has been producing a wide variety of products ranging from paper carrier bags to shipping packaging. Over 800 employees work at several company locations in Europe and contribute to the fact that the products are distributed in over 70 countries.
Initial situation:
In 2019, the company replaced its existing warehouse management system (SAP WM) at its headquarters with a decentralized SAP EWM. The EWM system included two automated warehouses connected via EWM-MFS. In the manual warehouses, forklift terminals with SAP Personas and the EWM RF framework were used as interfaces. A separate CEP solution for dispatch processing was also implemented. The EWM system went live in May 2019.
After the Hypercare phase, support for the EWM system was transferred to HPC in October 2019. The focus of the support was on stabilizing the topics of MFS, picking (automated warehouse) and CEP processing as well as building up know-how in the specialist departments.
Due to strong growth in sales and the associated internal process changes in the company, the demands on the existing EWM and the existing logistics processes also grew. Therefore, the EWM processes and the connected automation technology were further refined.
Furthermore, the existing non-SAP warehouse management systems at two company locations were replaced by SAP EWM, with the existing EWM system acting as a template. Within only 11 months, both sites were successfully put into production together with the customer, despite the disruptions caused by the Corona pandemic.
An essential prerequisite for this project success was the trustful and cooperative partnership.
What did HPC achieve?
- Reduction of support costs by more than 50% by stabilizing the system
- Bug fixes in the communication between PLC and EWM-MFS
- Reduction of complexity by reverting to near-standard solutions
- Optimizations
- MFS area
- Increase of the performance at the HRL picking station
- Parcel service orders no longer sequential
- Recalculation of the delivery stock
- Manual picking (RF)
- Error corrections to customer-specific RF dialogs
- Higher performance
- EWM rollouts
- Plant A within 6 months incl. Hypercare and go-live support
- Plant B within 5 months incl. Hypercare and go-live support
- Replacement of CEP shipping system
- Use of the "HPC.EWM Carrier Connect" add-on with the AEB Cloud
- Adaptation to company-specific requirements
- Replacement of mobile dialogs from Screen Personas to SAP UI5 with the UI5 converter add-on
- Introduction of Android mobile devices
- Improved cross-device display
- Scaling of dialogs to all end devices (scanners and forklift terminals).
Challenges
- Taking over system shortly after go-live from other implementation partner.
- The Corona pandemic made it difficult to realize on-site appointments
- Due to the short project duration, the knowledge level of the key users had to be improved quickly through intensive training sessions