Freudenberg Sealing Technologies (FST) — the largest division of Freudenberg Group — needed to centralize and standardize their labeling. With more than 70 locations around the world, they wanted to accomplish this on a global scale to reduce time and costs spent producing and changing labels for their customers and supply chain partners. A leading supplier of advanced materials and products for customers in automotive, industrial, and alternate drivetrain applications, FST also wanted to avoid hefty fines for labels that did not comply with customers’ requirements.
FST had more than 400 unique templates to manage. Completing label updates could take up to three months and depended on scarce development resources, limiting FST’s ability to respond quickly to changes in customer requirements. Long printing times combined with the inability to print labels simultaneously from their SAP ERP and EWM systems also resulted in significant productivity losses. As a result, the company decided to implement a global enterprise labeling solution project that provided certified SAP integration and scaled to meet their global requirements.
Before deploying Loftware Spectrum, FST had different labeling systems in different locations, including SAP Smartforms. But, making even small changes to layouts required limited development resources and could take several months. Meanwhile, customers charged high fees for labels that didn’t conform to their standards. With multiple labeling systems and duplicate templates, it was difficult to manage updates and maintain consistency over labels.
With many different SAP Smartforms for different labels, FST’s process to make changes was highly complex. Each change required technical resources and had to be managed through four different SAP environments (Dev/QA/Integration/Production). They often waited up to three months for changes to make it through the development, testing and approval process – even for minor layout changes. And because the developers were working on other priorities in their SAP systems, label changes were sometimes treated as lower priority.
In both Europe and the US, FST’s previous labeling solutions took a long time to spool and print. Resources in the factory and warehouse often had to stand by waiting for labels to be printed. This wasted up to 33 hours per day and cost the company more than $128,000 in lost productivity annually.
Also contributing to costly delays was FST’s inability to print directly from their SAP EWM and ECC systems simultaneously. Printing labels from both SAP systems at the same time caused conflicts in the spooling process, further delaying label printing and wasting resources. Case Study: Freudenberg
FST’s customers had specific and often unique labeling requirements which required limited development resources to make any changes. And, they charged high fees if labels did not comply with their standards. Because of the complexity of the process to update labels, it could be difficult to respond to changes in a timely manner, risking both fines and customer satisfaction.
Labeling our products is critical for customer satisfaction, as is compliance to world-wide standards.
Marcello Cambellotti
Global IT Manager Freudenberg FST Italy
FST deployed Loftware Spectrum as their Enterprise Labeling Solution to serve multiple distribution centers and facilities in Europe, with plans to expand to sites in North America. Currently, Spectrum is integrated with their warehouse management solution, SAP EWM, to print labels automatically based on actions users take in their EWM system. This allows users to perform their regular tasks in SAP, which trigger label printing without requiring additional action on the users’ part. Because Spectrum can support multiple integrations at the same time, FST also integrates smaller sites that don’t use EWM directly with their SAP ECC system to enable label printing.
Before Spectrum, FST struggled with bottlenecks in making changes to label layouts, which could take as long as three months to complete. Spectrum’s user-friendly label design makes it possible for the non-technical users in the business units to take ownership of label layouts and data, allowing IT to focus on system-wide requirements like new data fields, business rule changes and system integrations.
Loftware Spectrum’s native print drivers communicate in printers’ native language, speeding label printing and eliminating the need to load and maintain additional software drivers. Spectrum’s broad portfolio of native print drivers allow FST to continue using existing devices from Zebra and Kyocera for label printing. Leveraging Spectrum’s native drivers significantly reduce label print times and simplify system management.
