Factories can gain the competitive advantage via their USP’s. It can be as simple as their exceptional customer experience, the quality of their product or their digital initiatives to name a few. In this series, we’ll share some stories from Factory Digitalization in various industries. The first story in the series covers the journey of Sunorek who optimized their production and managed to start getting more done for less by using Eziil’s production intelligence software.
What is Eziil? You may ask. Well, Eziil helps manufacturers prepare data for effective resource planning by monitoring the supply chain thus providing a realistic overview of the whole production chain. This helps managers make better decisions based on the data they see from the manual and automated reporting. Eziil is also a partner company of Thorgate.
Who is Sunorek and why did they need digitalization?
Sunorek
AS Sunorek has been producing and selling window blinds and coverings in Estonia for more than 25 years. Since 2000, AS Sunorek has developed, designed, manufactured and marketed custom-made furniture solutions under the brand name Tank Indoor. That’s where the story takes us.
A desire for efficiency
Karto Kõrv, the manager of the Tank Indoor, soon after joining the company, found that too much of his and the team's time is spent on collecting data and reporting it in order to compile an adequate production overview.
"When I came to work for Sunorek AS in July 2017, all data was written on paper and every morning the production manager picked up the papers and entered the data into an Excel table. I reacted relatively quickly to this and picked up old computers to install Excel in them to use spreadsheets that were immediately accessible through a network drive. Therefore, I no longer had to fill in the paperwork by hand and no one had to go to pick it up which usually required additional time, unnecessary paperwork and understanding, etc.
This did not solve the problem, but it improved the situation a bit. The problem was that there was still a lot of manual labour that went into editing the Excel spreadsheet. Moreover, often there were situations where the spreadsheet was busy because someone forgot to log out and left the computer by itself, and so on. It was clear that an alternative to the broken spreadsheets had to be found.
Once while browsing a magazine at home, I discovered an article about Eziil. This article introduced Eziil as a production tracking software. Since this was the need of the time in our factory, this topic immediately caught my attention. I got in touch with Eziil and that is where our working relationship grew" - Karto Kõrv
Why Eziil?
Karto points out that when looking for a solution to his problem, there were some other solutions on the table as well however, a strong customer service team, the ability to customize the solution and the flexibility it provides helped them choose Eziil:
"We needed the kind of flexibility that Eziil has given us. It was known at the outset that we could not cope with the so-called standard solution and that custom solutions needed to be developed. I got immediate answers to most of the questions that arose during the implementation phase of the program. Eziil's email support was enough to get assistance right away.When it was clear to me how everything should work, I trained the teams one by one on how to use the software and why it is needed.” - Karto Kõrv
Key Results
At the time of writing this there are 12 reporting points, used by ~30 people daily, all across the factory connected to the Eziil’s software. Implementing this has helped Tank indoors and the Sunorek group reduce their overall turnaround time and carbon footprint, increase production efficiency and gain a digital overview of people, processes and equipment that is being involved in the various production stages.
Conclusion
“I had to devote some of my time to this process, but this time was a valuable investment.Optimizing our factory production made everything concise and we're saving time which we can use to actually do more work." - Karto Kõrv
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