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Peterson Emballasje is Norway’s largest packaging company, with more than 850 employees and annual revenue in excess of US $130 million. The company, with production facilities throughout Scandinavia and Finland, supplies fiber-based packaging, packaging technology and display material. The packaging solutions are designed by an inhouse design department. Peterson Emballasje is the largest Scandinavian supplier of display products, with 45% of the Norwegian market. The company is part of the Peterson group, one of Norway’s largest family-owned enterprises, with 2000 employees and more than US $330 million in annual revenue. Component-based business applications from IFS, providing accurate business information, are the latest strategy to ensure that Peterson Emballasje maintains its market position and can meet the challenge of increased competition.
The challenge
1998, Peterson Emballasje decided to implement an integrated solution at its three facilities in
Norway. Before going live at the third factory, Peterson Emballasje realized that the solutions at the first two sites contained too many customizations. Therefore a decision was made to start from scratch, with a vision of a standard solution that could
be fully utilized, even in a traditional area like the packaging industry.
The main focus was to radically improve operations, not necessarily to implement new IT software. The solution
The reason Peterson Emballasje chose IFS Applications can be summed up in four words: competitiveness, costs, revenue and capital. The company wanted to meet customer demands for delivery times and precision; access to business
information was therefore essential. Since the industry has moved from “cartel to competition” in a stagnant market, Peterson wanted to increase its competitiveness by increasing efficiency and cutting costs. Business Development Manager at Peterson
Emballasje, Oystein Skjerve, comments, “For us, the choice of IFS Applications meant a new way of looking at our business. Of course it’s a standard system with standard functionality and a standard database. But it’s much more than that. We had three
factories with long histories, each with different ways of running its operations. Routines differed, production specifications differed, objectives differed—in fact if anything could be different, you could be sure it was! Therefore the primary goal of
the project was to standardize our business processes. IFS’ consultants encouraged us to use standard processes in the application throughout the project.”
Implementation
The first three months of the project were spent almost entirely on process design. The challenge was to establish common processes and work routines throughout the organization, while running a standard system. Oystein Skjerve
continues, “The classical misconception that everyone was so special had to be buried once and for all. After some hard work we hammered out work processes that could be used with a standard system. In some cases we were able to use the processes as IFS
had visualized; in other situations, we resolved issues with some creative thinking. As a result, we managed to implement a solution that is nearly without customizations.”
The project kicked off in January 2000 and went live in September the same year with a complete ERP solution at all facilities simultaneously. Benefits
Peterson Emballasje now has a standard system with a common solution for all its operations. For Oystein Skjerve, the biggest advantage is the dramatically improved access to business information. “Internally, we are now in a position
to leverage the benefits of having three production facilities nationwide. All three facilities can collaborate more easily, we have the same working methods, and we can access the same information. Since the plants use the same system, we have achieved
entirely new levels of flexibility in the organization. In fact, one of our sites has lent employees to the others on a couple of occasions, and these employees have been able to fit right in without any extra training since the computer system and
routines are the same, regardless of workplace. It also means that sales representatives deal with the same routines no matter which plant is used for production.”
Another advantage of the solution from IFS is increased collaboration and better connectivity with customers and suppliers. “One aspect that has become more apparent after implementing the system is that we, our customers and suppliers now have common routines. Those who use standard business applications have more or less the same processes, terminology
and functions as we have in our system. In the past communication was based on our routines and solutions; today, we can communicate using common terminology and processes,” adds Skjerve. This increased interaction is a step in the direction of e-commerce, according to Skjerve. “Today it’s easier to see the business processes and solutions underlying the material our customers present, and we get a clearer picture of
the type of information we require in our system. In the future, we can envision integrating planning solutions at our facilities and at customer sites. We have laid the foundation with IFS Applications, and today we are working with solutions that could
very well be defined as e-commerce.” By way of concluding, Oystein Skjerve points to another benefit of IFS Applications in relation to ISO 9001 certification. “The way we modeled our work processes was a great help in this issue. Today, our user documentation for the
business applications is an important part of our quality assurance,” he concludes. Software
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IFS/Sales & Marketing (CRM)
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