clients / case studies / businesses

Korsnas Packaging

Goal

To standardize sales processes, utilize manufacturing resources more efficiently and cost-effectively, and provide greater management visibility to company leadership

Solution

Delivery of a portable sales management tool, which provided better company resource utilization and greater cost and sales reporting to leadership

Results

Introduction

Korsnäs Packaging is one of the world's largest paper sack manufacturing company with over 20 locations across Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Middle East.

It needed to provide a standard, portable sales tool to its multinational sales staff to standardize the sales process, easily authorize and inform the sales team about incentives and discounts, and direct the sales team, near real-time, to make sales targeted towards under-utilized manufacturing plants.  If the sales team, across a wide-ranging geographic area, could be dynamically targeted to make sales --- even if discounted --- to under-utilized manufacturing plants or resources, then the company as a whole would prosper with the greater overall manufacturing utilization.  So, through periodic synchronization, the tool had to be updated with the latest discount incentives and delivery timeframes for the multiple manufacturing facilities. 

During the synchronization process, the headquarters would receive updates on sales mades and sales projections.  So leadership would receive a much more timely forecast on orders and financials.

In addition to the portable sales tool, company leadership needed central visibility regarding the utilization, backlog and waste at each manufacturing facility.  These data feeds served to both identify where incoming orders should be directed, but would also highlight efficiencyand cost-effectiveness issues at one plant (or machine) vice others.  

Previous Korsnäs efforts to build an application within the confines of SAP had cost the company millions of dollars. In the end, the company could not maintain SAP having learned that using it across the enterprise was cost-prohibitive, especially for the smaller markets.

What did we do?

  • Built a custom application for Korsnäs at less than 1/10 of the SAP cost
  • Delivered the solution within six months
  • Solution integrates with and enhances the SAP implementation at the SAP-enabled plants; and supplants the SAP solution at the other locations

How did we do it?

Since internet infrastructure does not exist in some Korsnäs markets, Ephibian’s solution is composed of a client/server architecture:
  • A mobile, PC client, used by the sales force and the smaller “dial-in” plants
  • Back-end web enabled applications, and a database based on IBM DB2, portable to a Linux or AS/400 environment
  • Synchronization code for data exchange during “check-in”
  • An administrative/executive interface that consolidates data and provides critical reporting at the executive level
  • A variety of measurements of profitability (the company as a whole, profitability of an individual plant, profitability of a specific machine, profitability of a sales region or individual salesman, etc.)
  • Equipment benchmarking across multiple plants
  • Standardization of prices, margins, waste levels and products to be Sold & Produced