System-supported production planning at Ergoswiss

Ergoswiss AG stands for ergonomics at workplaces and Swiss technology.

The Swiss company Ergoswiss AG, headquartered in Widnau (SG), is committed to more ergonomics at production workplaces – in all industries. The company develops and produces hydraulic and spindle lifting systems for workbenches, assembly workstations, packing tables, industrial kitchens, watchmakers’ tables and many other workstations.

Basis for scaling

Digitalization is an integral part of the company’s strategy, as Andreas Heuscher, Head of Development & Design and member of the Executive Board at Ergoswiss, says. We have great growth potential in our market. Our goal is to double our sales in the next five years, ideally with the same number of employees. To this end, we need to make our entire processes scalable. An end-to-end ERP system with interfaces to all our other programs is essential as a basis.

Objective

The company sees optimization potential in production in particular. “Our production planning system consists of Excel lists. Their maintenance, such as listing all incoming orders, currently employs a 100-percent position,” says Andreas Heuscher. Throughput times are not stored.

The entire production is planned with a lot of gut feeling. In some cases, this leads to emergency weekend operations because we don’t know in advance what the material availability will be. We would like to have a reliable planning basis.

Bottom-up initiative

The desire for more efficient processes and clear responsibilities is also germinating among the production employees themselves. “With the introduction of a new ERP system, we are aiming for consistent and more cost-effective processes. In addition, we want to strengthen our sales channels via interfaces to the ERP system,” says Andreas Heuscher.

Solution

After an intensive selection process, Ergoswiss finally opted for the cloud-based ERP system SAP Business ByDesign. “The production mapping in the SAP system was decisive. The representation of multi-level bills of materials convinced us,”
says Andreas Heuscher.

The software promises us better controlling, an attractively prepared overview of all key figures, and the associated number-based decision-making aids.

Cost savings

In this way, the development and manufacturing company wants to achieve more transparency and at the same time reduce the susceptibility to errors in production planning. As a result, Ergoswiss is making great strides toward its decided growth goals. “Many communication loops, running routes and manual documentation will be eliminated by the upcoming automation. Thanks to SAP Business ByDesign, we will be able to save process costs in the long term and use human resources for more substantial tasks.”