The foundation stone of FEINGUSS BLANK GmbH was laid in 1960 by Dipl. Ing. Wilhelm Blank in Riedlingen, where the company is now headquartered. Currently, after more than 60 years on the market, FEINGUSS BLANK has around 500 employees and successfully sells investment casting products, both steel and aluminium investment castings, worldwide. Classic customers of the family-owned company are active in the automotive, mechanical engineering, aerospace and medical technology sectors.
At the beginning of 2018, DATAGROUP was commissioned to bring transparency into the company’s planning and control processes, to enable paperless order processing and to greatly streamline communication and coordination processes. Furthermore, a restructuring and qualitative enrichment of the master data was commissioned as part of the project.
The technology, therefore, does not require any interfaces or middleware and thus enables a smooth interaction with other SAP modules such as PM, MM, FI/CO, HR, SD, etc.. Furthermore, OPRA allows the seamless integration of non-SAP systems; both optimise data transparency and integrity.
User- or role-specific as well as uniform interfaces also significantly increase efficiency and user-friendliness compared to standard SAP and avoid duplicate data entry. This sustainably saves resources and thus cash for FEINGUSS BLANK GmbH.
After initial scepticism among the maintenance staff, who previously worked with the standard SAP EAM (Enterprise Asset Management), formerly SAP PM (Plant Maintenance), Andreas Burgmaier, the project manager, now says: “The staff can no longer imagine their work without OPRAmobile. If you ask them, they only say “You can take the spanner from us but not OPRA any more”. The maintenance solution is therefore highly accepted, not only because of the more efficient design of work processes, but also because of the increasing digitalisation.
The entire project started with a 10-month so-called re-design phase, with the background of revising and redesigning the maintenance processes and redefining all master data and planning data of the plants. The re-design phase was followed by the 6-month implementation phase, during which OPRA was installed, key users were introduced to the new organisation, the processes and OPRA were trained and the employees were familiarised with working with mobile devices.
The implementation of OPRA at BLANK has enabled faster and paperless order processing and a reduction in administrative work. This is because until now, the maintenance department handled all processes on a printed working paper. Through the implementation, they now have the possibility to document their work assignments digitally on site.
DATAGROUP ensures greater efficiency in the area of communication processes at BLANK, which also results in shorter process times. It was also possible to reduce manual transmission errors. Due to the optimisation of the processes, less management intervention is necessary, which is why the management level can concentrate on controlling and optimisation tasks.
However, the introduction was also associated with some challenges:
“One challenge during the introduction was the non-existent area-wide availability of the WLAN and the master data management. The WLAN was continuously expanded for this purpose until complete coverage could be achieved. In addition, improvements were made to our master data management and thus the quality and quantity were continuously improved. The master data was also reworked in this process in order to be able to use it meaningfully in the process,” says Andreas Burgmaier, Head of Plant Planning.
The project had a conception phase of two to three months. A total of 20 maintenance staff and three team leaders were involved in the project, who processed over 10,000 tickets in ten months to realise the project. The implementation of OPRA and the associated gap filling subsequently took a total of six months. After an orientation and stabilisation phase, the foremen and supervisors in production can now also submit their maintenance requirements digitally.
New phases of the project are also in the starting blocks: The implementation of the new release and the entire roll-out of OPRA to production. The goal is to enable BLANK’s production to directly record its own messages in OPRA. In this way, the call, the phone call or the e-mail for the colleague from maintenance is taken care of. In future, this information will be embedded in processes. A valuable advantage of this project is also staff motivation. The personal responsibility of the maintenance staff has been strengthened and a higher level of identification has been achieved.