As a company that manufactures mechanical and electrical drive systems, Flender began receiving a growing number of requests for customisable gear units. What has long been standard practice in the consumer sector has now reached the B2B segment. Customers really want products that are available in a number of variants that can be configured based on their individual needs. However, being able to supply the right gear unit to meet every need has been a time-consuming and costly undertaking up to now. In partnership with adesso, Flender sought to automate its business processes on the basis of an integrated, cutting-edge enterprise architecture.
Variant management as a tool to create the next-generation gear unit
Flender GmbH
>> Flender One is a real breakthrough on the path towards personalisation and sustainability. Our customers receive a completely new type of gear unit solution that always meets their exact requirements and thus eliminates waste. This is made possible by automating our business processes on the basis of an integrated, cutting-edge enterprise architecture. The end result is less work for our engineers during the sales and manufacturing processes and a reduction in the time needed to deliver the gear unit to the customer.
Peter Hensel | Head of Configuration and Data Management | Flender Group
Project
Challenge
However, as simple as the customer’s written request for a customised product may be, it has an impact on the products and processes of manufacturing companies in many ways. If Flender changes even one component in the gear unit, the entire gear unit has to be re-tested – something that takes up a lot of its engineers’ time if done by hand. Similar challenges can be found along the entire value chain, which brings with it a constant increase in complexity.
Solution
Together with adesso, Flender has comprehensively digitised and automated its order acquisition and order processing processes. The result is an enterprise architecture for variant management: the FIRE framework. This includes a smart modular system for variant configuration, which acts as a central orchestrator controlling all business processes. It covers all workflows from the customer's enquiry to final commissioning and service at the operator's site.
To create the enterprise architecture, adesso employed a modular approach to combine various solutions from different system environments, ranging from SAP and Salesforce to Microsoft Azure and other tools. By doing so, adesso was able to provide everything in-house, which included creating the design for a customer portal that offers a 3D visualisation of the gear units and simple self-configuration by the customer.
Result
With Flender ONE, the company is able to offer intelligent, configurable gear units at attractive conditions and achieve complete automation with the help of the FIRE framework developed by adesso. The path to this goal is simple for both sides. In just a few steps, companies can configure a gear unit that meets their individual requirements - in the high quality they have come to expect from Flender. Thanks to intelligent variant management, Flender itself reduces the workload of its engineers and cuts throughput times and production costs.
>> Intended use, performance, speed are the three parameters that customers can use to quickly find the right gear unit solution for them. We no longer ask them to describe the specifications and properties they wish the gear unit to have. We only ask them about the intended use. The customer tells us how and where he wants to use the gear unit, and we tell him which gear unit with which features he needs to meet his requirements.
Dr Jan Reimann | Project Manager | Flender Group
Flender is a leading global supplier for mechanical and electrical drive systems and has the reputation for outstanding performance, innovation, quality, and reliability of drive components for more than 120 years. The company offers a broad variety of gear units, couplings and generators and associated services, with a focus on key industries such as wind power, cement, mining, oil and gas, power generation, water and wastewater, marine as well as conveyor and crane technology. Flender products and services combine the latest technology with extremely high quality and have been reliably providing the optimal transmission of power for decades. Flender employs roughly 8,700 people worldwide.
Do you have any questions?
There is no website or brochure which can replace a personal meeting to talk about your goals and topics. We are looking forward to an appointment on site.
Managing Director Andreas Liesche andreas.liesche@adesso.de