infoTECH Feature

May 26, 2011

Saint-Gobain Recognized For High Achievement at Progressive Manufacturing Awards

One of the leading providers of manufacturing software solutions, Apriso recently announced that its customer Saint-Gobain - Innovative Materials was selected as the leading manufacturer in the Data and Integration Mastery category at the 2011 Progressive Manufacturing Awards.

A panel of judges chose Saint-Gobain ahead of the other 29 category nominees at the 2011 Manufacturing Leadership Summit which was held at The Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida.

One of the main reasons why Saint-Gobain was recognized was due to the results achieved during integration of Apriso's FlexNet with SAP (News - Alert) ERP which was done in order to improve the overall shop floor efficiency. By making full use of Apriso's "Core" implementation methodology, key business processes that comprised of the most important functionality for a typical Sekurit facility were selected as a "blueprint" of best practices. This was then packaged, distributed and implemented to every location, which resulted in a standardized product cot and KPI calculations and measurements across 44 plants; sustained performance improvement from identification and replication of global best practices; reduced production costs by up to 30% and greater local operational flexibility while adhering to a standardized and unified global IT platform.

In a release, Pascal Ober, director, SAP+ global delivery center, Innovative Materials Sector said that “Each facility may have some unique way of doing things that could benefit other plants. We identified best practices and incorporated them within a Core profile, to then deploy across the enterprise at each location. The template is flexible enough, however, that it can be easily modified to meet local conditions, as well as be updated to reflect new process improvements.”

The Progressive Manufacturing Awards honor manufacturing companies that have transformed themselves through the use of information technology. The program recognizes innovative projects that deliver competitive advantage. The data and integration mastery category recognizes companies that have achieved systems and process integration between two or more business functions.

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Ober went on to say that "We thought it was better to do one big change than two medium-sized ones. A traditional approach would split a large project into smaller elements to reduce risk. Also, some might argue that decentralized IS and IT might be too plant-specific, prohibiting efficient change. We saw this implementation as a unique opportunity to bring our factory IS and IT people on board early in the game. We envisioned IT savings by avoiding the proliferation of small local projects at the plant-floor operations level in parallel with the SAP implementation. We also sought to optimize both centralized and local resources."


Carolyn John is a Contributor to TMCnet. To read more of her articles, please columnist page.

Edited by Rich Steeves
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