'When you grow, the key is to unify your processes. Otherwise, your operational machines can handle production growth, but your administration can't keep up,' was the message from Marc Schmitz of Schoeller Allibert. The CIO spoke about how Europe's largest manufacturer of plastic containers and reusable packaging is deploying robots at Coforce's "Increasing Operational Excellence and Customer Focus" seminar on July 4, 2019.
Schoeller Allibert is an international supplier of innovative plastic transport packaging. Not well known to the general public, the company develops, produces and supplies, among other things, the crates in which Heineken puts its beer pipes. Growing steadily, Schoeller Allibert has multiple production sites (13 of which are in Europe) and is represented in more than 50 countries worldwide.
Schoeller Allibert has grown in recent years mainly through mergers and acquisitions. The various divisions have naturally had their own working methods. A lot of work is done in Excel, which results in a lot of data being copied and pasted, often from one system to another. It is not difficult to see that everything can be done much more efficiently. It is complex to realize, though.
Says Schmitz, "For the long term, we started an ERP selection and implementation process that will take several years. We quickly found a solution in robotization for achieving short-term efficiency goals. A robot always does it, with the same quality and also always right.'
Outgoing invoices
One of the processes that was robotized is the preparation and sending of outgoing invoices. The software robot (named Robin) logs into the ERP environment and retrieves all invoices ready to be sent. It then prepares the invoices in MS Word in the appropriate template. If the invoice is to be sent by mail, the robot prepares a pdf file for an external mailing company that does the further handling. Invoices to be sent by e-mail it prepares for a second robot, which takes care of the sending.
Most of the time went into standardizing the processes. 'If you are going to work with robots, then one process in one country should be exactly the same as the same process in another country. That was by no means the case. There were three ways of sending invoices, and everyone spread across multiple countries was doing it differently,' Schmitz illustrates. 'So we spent most of our time trying to unify the practices. You have to do that, otherwise your operational machines can handle the growth, but your administrations can't.'
