In good shape with ORDAT.ERP

When Dr. Ing. Günther Kaupert manufactured his first metal chocolate mould in 1948, he had no premonition of the avalanche of developments he would be setting of.  In that days, the company founder built tools in Lüdenscheid amongst which was a forming tool for a manufacturer of metal chocolate moulds. When that manufacturer failed to pay for the tools, the resourceful son-in-law Dr. Günther Kaupert had the idea to use that unpaid tool to produce chocolate moulds himself. Surprised by the success the company rose within a short time to become a specialist for chocolate moulds which are still manufactured in the plant at Erndtebrück.

In 1955 Kaupert extended its product range by producing pre-shaped packages according to company-internal patents. For these types of form packaging a new plant was built in 1958 in Marburg.

Today, the Kaupert Group produces chocolate forms at three sites – now, however, the forms are of plastics, not of metal –, form packages for the food and non-food industry as well as other products of plastics. The customers of Kaupert especially include renowned sweets manufacturers like Ferrero, Lindt and Lambertz. In 2003 Kaupert‘s management board decided to introduce an integrated ERP system in order to control the processes at the plant in Marburg.

“Before the launch of the new system we have managed our purchase via Microsoft Office and the production was more or less controlled visually,“ Erhard Lindner, operating  manager at Kaupert in Marburg, says. “Given that these methods did not any longer meet our requirements, we wanted a complete IT solution for all business areas.”

The 80 employees at Kaupert in Marburg produce blisters and forming trays, e.g. for praline and cookie packaging, denesting machines as well as pre-embossed aluminum and plastic foils for hollow chocolate figurines in a thermoforming process. The production of blisters creates special demands in the applied ERP system which has to be able to control the recycling of foil remnants. Other important selection criteria were the failsafe performance of the system and the regional proximity of the support team.

“In Marburg we don’t have any on-site IT experts,“ Erhard Lindner explains. “That is why we would like to rely on stable software and we also want to make sure that help comes fast in case a problem occurs.”  After a thorough selection process it was decided in favor of ORDAT.ERP. The function volume of ORDAT.ERP convinced the Kaupert project team all along the line: "ORDAT.ERP qualifies for all our predefined criteria 100 percent,” production manager Lindner says. “Also our material-specific requirements of the blisters production are completely covered by the ORDAT.ERP functionality of recycling.”

Further reasons for this decision made in favor of ORDAT.ERP were the certified competences of ORDAT in the process industry and, last but not least, the good relationship of the colleagues in Marburg with the ORDAT consultants on site.

After a short implementation phase the system started its productive run in May 2004 with the modules of Sales, Warehousing, Production, Purchase and FIS. In all business lines of the company the procedures were analyzed and the mapping of the processes was defined in ORDAT.ERP. The fast project success was due to the good teamwork among the Kaupert employess and the ORDAT experts and also due to the high degree of coverage of ORDAT.ERP: individual adjustments of the software were unnecessary; only the documents in Purchase, Sales and Production were customized.

Just after a short time it had been clear, that the investment into ORDAT payed off. ”The biggest advantage for us was: finally transparency” production manager Lindner cheers in retrospect. Before the implementation of ORDAT.ERP, Kaupert was missing detailed data of the stocks because receipts and stock issues could not be settled. With the help of ORDAT.ERP it has finally become possible to track the route of a customer order through the production to the warehouse and the shipment. Also the high-performance tools management in ORDAT.ERP is a precious advantage: the hundreds of »tools« – that is what the moulds for the production of the different moulding dies and embossed products are called at Kaupert – are now numbered and stored with all respective components as bill of material in the system.  Upon planning shop orders ORDAT.ERP immediately checks the availability of the tool and of its components and informs about probable bottlenecks. In the next production steps the application of the tools can be controlled and monitored with the help of ORDAT.ERP. Thus, the overview about the warehouse or operational site of the tools is preserved at any time.