Brief company description
KSK Belt is a rubber manufacturing company based in the heart of Europe. With its 30 employees and 30+ years on the European market, it is considered as a small and stable manufacturing company. Its product portfolio lists 100+ product items.
Needs and expectations
KSK Belt was trying to solve the following pain points:
- Need to deliver 100+ different products with complex manufacturing processes in a team of 20 technical workers.
- Need to easily transfer knowledge between experienced experts and junior staff (retirement, lack of qualified personnel, etc.)
- Need to document maintenance know-how for 20+ machines that need different repair procedures. The know-how should be easily transferable since the amount of qualified technical personnel is expected to decrease dramatically in next decade (welders, electrical engineers, etc.).
- Enable remote management of the company since the management is responsible for region sales
- Enable better quality management
- Enable margin-level control of products
Why OFFISEEK
KSK Belt already has an on-premise accounting software they are happy with. However, the accounting system does not offer modules for intuitive production planning, easy access of the system from anywhere and any device or support for multimedia documentation (videos, etc.). Many ERP systems don't offer such functionalities that became part of the modern day to day life. The OFFISEEK platform attracted the KSK Belt team mainly by:
- Possibility to add intuitive custom dashboards for each department
- Deployment of the system in 10 minutes, unlike on premise systems that take several weeks to deploy (custom server, etc.)
- Low initial costs - 1000 EUR / year vs. 10 000 EUR for on-premise system (without maintenance fees of on-premise systems)
- Accessibility of the system from anywhere and any device
- Easy and intuitive way of storing and accessing video documentation
- Visionary founders with experience in machine learning and AI that want to push the boundaries of the field
Setup and deployment
As the OFFISEEK platform offers a free 14 days trial, the KSK Belt team was able to easily test all the functionalities of the platform. During that period the team compiled a list of required items needed for system customization:
- Departments that should have custom dashboards
- Stations / Machines that are available in each department
- List of approvals that have to be executed in each department
- Work shifts that are used in the factory - workdays, length, etc.
- List of users that should access the system and their permissions
Afterwards, the OFFISEEK team adjusted the trial account in 10 minutes based on the customers requirements. Of course, the KSK Belt team could have done the setup in the platform on their own.
As a first step in the system deployment, the KSK Belt team configured two tablets where the OFFISEEK platform can be accessed from Internet browser. One tablet was handed to the quality manager and the second one to the maintenance manager who secured the tablets with face recognition access.
Thanks to the cloud setup of the system, there was no need to create PC stations in each department, only to hand tablets. Setup of the PC stations would require additional space and costs such as preparing electricity setup in the manufacturing area, purchasing PCs with monitors, etc.
Enabling process changes
After the system had been deployed for four weeks, the factory owners noticed following:
- The owners log-in daily to the system and have a full overview of the orders and production (in comparison to weekly sync meetings)
- Sales representatives started uploading PDF, XLSX attachments to the product orders and everything is accessible at one place.
- New orders are being pre-filled by the AI-Copilot with the historically attached documentation and manufacturing tasks
- Quality manager does not run there and back in the factory to exchange papers with the production manager
- Maintenance manager purchased a mobile camera and encourages maintenance workers to record videos of each complex maintenance repair. Such videos are then uploaded and described on the maintenance dashboard. Kind of Youtube for maintenance workers.
Outcomes
- 6% decrease in labor costs. Combination of the factory management software and giving more responsibility to less experienced people on other positions enabled smooth transition when senior production manager retired.
- 40% => 90% owner's understanding of business. Owners spend the same amount of time for managing the factory but with much more insight and ability to guide managers and workers.
- 600 pages of paper saved monthly
- 40 000 steps ~ 2-3 man-days - saved monthly for managing paper communication.
- 0 => 30 uploaded documented video repairs in first 3 months and adding more.
- 76% => 98% of correctly setup margins. Correctly set margins led to savings of 1% of total revenue.
