ESBE AB
Optimizing the business is crucial if we are to keep production in Sweden
ESBE is the very essence of a good Swedish company: a profitable manufacturing company with a global market and sales representatives in more than 20 countries, and who, despite this, prefer to keep their entire production in Småland, where the company has been operating for generations.
ESBE invests in ProMark
ESBE manufactures products for regulating heating and air conditioning in large and small properties. ESBE employs a staff of some 180 and has sales of approximately SEK 350 million. While it is true that the products manufactured are of high quality, production could also be moved to a low-cost country. However, one of the owner’s requirements is for the company to stay in Sweden. Because of this, ESBE needs to hone all aspects of its business to survive the ever harsher competition.
Having an efficient business system linked to a measurement tool which stretches right out to the factory floor is one of ESBE’s major trump cards in this work. ESBE runs SAP business system and has chosen to connect Mark Information’s ProMark to it. ProMark provides real time information on exactly where components are in the production line and on capacity status, i.e. which employees are on site in real time, thus allowing ESBE to allocate resources to exactly the place they are needed for an optimum production process.
Resource overview
This may involve fundamentals such as keeping track of which personnel are present and what they are doing, but could equally well involve advanced logistics, where components and goods are monitored in real time and resources can be reallocated between different facilities.
"How long was spent on a particular order, a particular task and who performed it? How many components have been scrapped? Which orders are complete? Which are still being dealt with? Which have been discontinued? We can get the answers to all of these questions, and this gives us an extremely good overall grasp of the business," says Heinz D Hoffmann, IT manager at ESBE.
Integration to ESBE SAP system
ProMark is simple to integrate with SAP - Mark Information is a certified partner of SAP. As ProMark is a standard system, it never needs to be coded upon implementation, but merely needs to be configured with the customer's existing business system, a process that usually takes about one day.
"It took a little longer in our case, since we needed to add detailed information about how our factory works with regard to time in lieu, overtime etc, but Mark Information's consultants managed this extremely efficiently," says Heinz D Hoffmann.
Increased flexibility
While it is true that reporting in ProMark involves closer monitoring of company staff, the system is not primarily intended for this but to rather to check on such things as where human resources are needed so that scheduling can quickly be reorganized. For the staff, the system also provides increased flexibility and options to take control of their own tasks. Today, workers on the factory floor have an improved overview of their work and are better able to schedule their own time, such when to take time off in lieu, without needing to make a detour via the payroll department.
Cost Control
ESBE has now been using ProMark since 2005. "It has worked well throughout that time and the system operates without the need for maintenance", Heinz D Hoffman tells us.
"This has been a way for us to grow and expand, while keeping down administration expenses. As resource utilization in production is so high and wastage is so low, pay levels are but one of a number of factors determining where we locate the production line. Because of this we can rely on keeping production Sweden in the future too," says Heinz D Hoffmann.
Published November 30, 2008
