Digitization

As in all areas of life and business, digitization also has a major impact on logistics. We are making increasing efforts to digitally map the entire value chain in order to achieve a wide variety of interlinked goals: On the one hand, digital processes can already be used in production control to optimize the use of resources, make production planning flexible, and optimize maintenance processes. In the networking of all partners involved through digital interfaces, we see the opportunity to create great transparency: The complete process is covered and the customers can see at any time where the order currently stands and whether there are any delays. With the real-time data, better decisions can be made and the individual players can be aligned more effectively. In the near future, we are therefore planning a project for a customer portal where users can access useful information 24/7 (including full tracking of orders in the sense of a seamless digital customer experience).

As you can see: Digitization can also play a role in industries where you might not have suspected it directly at the beginning. We regard digitization as a task that constantly inspires us to come up with new ideas to achieve optimum results for all those involved in the process.

But of course, digitization has also arrived within our organization. We are constantly seeking to identify the processes and interfaces that can be improved through digitization. In this context, we focus on two perspectives: On the one hand, it is important for us to achieve excellence internally by means of flawless cooperation. This includes, for example, the introduction of a new ERP system, which we completed back in 2016. Since then, we have been constantly optimizing process flows, shortening processing times and analyzing data that can give us valuable indications for improvements (business process automation). We have been able to achieve our goal of operating paperless almost completely on our journey, even though there are still work steps here and there that require paper documentation.

We have also been able to achieve smoother workflows in internal cooperation with the switch to O365, which ultimately benefits everyone with whom we have interfaces. For the operation of our ICT system, we rely on cloud technologies, which guarantee us great flexibility and open up room for action. This allows us to easily implement new releases of our ERP system, which require an identical test environment in parallel to the live system.