In the past years the importance of surface engineering has increased a lot . The company Galvanotechnik Kessel GmbH which was founded in 1975 represents this sector of industry. The company from Northern Germany provides the entire portfolio of surface engineering, such as electrochemical plating using zinc, zinc-nickel, zinc-iron, hard-chromium, nickel, tin, tin-silver, phosphatizing, silver, copper or also chemical nickel-plating, polishing, grinding, pickling, and lubricating. Requirements of the EU's End of Life Vehicles Directive (ELV) regarding the elminiation of chrome VI and lead have been fulfilled for years. The company employs 80 people in three shifts; among the customers are businesses from the automotive, electro and electronic industry, as well as mechanical engineering and commercial vehicle construction.

"Increasing demands and, therefore, further necessary adjustments would have disproportionately increased the price of the individual solution we were using previously," remembers Jürgen Gröhl, who manages the company together with Bernd Buhse. The managers decided to start looking for a new ERP system, which was supposed to better suit a medium-sized business in terms of price/performance ratio. "In 1994 we decided on the ERP software by ABAS which already covered many of our requirements in the standard. The introduction of the ERP system, as well as all individual adjustments were carried out by the sales partner abas system GmbH from Berlin," says manager Bernd Buhse.

The following years proved that this decision was correct - the flexibility of the system and the know-how of the supporting parter were always in demand. "We grew continuoulsy over the past ten years and had to optimize our processes, especially production and quality control, in order to remain competitive. The high production costs in this region are forcing us to efficiently organize business processes," remarks Jürgen Göhl. All modules of the abas Business Software are being used at the surface engineering specialist, the main focus is placed on production planning and control, as well as the interfaces to the electroplating plants and automatic analyzers (electrolyte bath administration) and the connection of qualtity assurance.

The ERP software by ABAS supports the organization of production processes at Galvantotechnik Kessel. This, for example, includes the provision of work order suggestions and work orders, capacity planning, completion confirmations, editable sales order production list, or manual production entries in the system. In the goods receipt the delivery is checked for quantities and state and all necessary data is recorded in the ERP system. In doing so, each container is provided with a receipt/issue slip containing all production relevant information which is also subject to confirmation in the software just like the other processing steps. "This ensures that all tests and jobs are carried out completely and in the right sequence and also serves as a confirmation for our customers," explains Bernd Buhse. Work plans and work orders which contain all the data and processing steps of the lot are created from the recorded data and also accompany them on all stations through the company. Weekly plans for production are created on the basis of the work plans. The abas ERP data always is the basis for doing so. All orders in the company have accompanying documents with barcodes which are read using PDC at each processing station. Thus, it can be reproduced at any time where a lot is, which processing steps already have been carried out and which ones are still to be carried out.

The surface quality of parts can have large effects on their functionality. For the automotive industry it is for example indispensable that even after years it can be retraced when and how a part or a lot has been electroplated. Galvanotechnik Kessel GmbH & Co. KG therefore ensures that the processing quality complies with requirements by automatically controlling the analysis and optimizing the electrolyte bath using ERP. By request, an itemization is created for every production batch and then archived for ten years. For these jobs all data is also recorded in the abas Business Software which then provides the necessary confirmations and accompanying documents for the customer. Thus, even after years it can still be documented using which quality production parameters the orders were executed. The parts are checked in the QA laboratory at random by means of inspection specifications and plans. In quality control the thickness of the coating is measured by means of the CAQ software Babtec-CAQ. Thanks to the open interfaces of the abas Business Software to connect external systems these tasks can be realized easily. "Every time expansions or adjustments have to be carried out we realize that we made a good choice with the abas Business Software. Here it becomes clear that the software is always kept on an up-to-date status," says Bernd Buhse. An example for this was the required connection to the logistics system "Ames-T" of the Volkswagen group. This system is to enable a process-oriented optimization of the procurement logistics with the sub-contractors and connects DP supported scheduling elements with the control of the material flow. "All requirements of our customers Volkswagen and Audi were realized quickly thanks to the abas Business Software," adds Buhse.

The abas Business Software at Galvanotechnik Kessel is running on a Linux server, Windows PCs are installed as clients. "Our operating costs can thus be limited; we do not want to have our own IT department. For a company of our size an easy to operate and stable system using Linux is perfect. We can carry out small adjustments ourselves, more specialized tasks are carried out by our partner in Berlin," says Bernd Buhse. The stability of the system also leaves nothing to be desired: "The hardware/software combination runs absolutely stable - our system did not crash once in ten years," emphasizes Jürgen Göhl. "The ERP system replaced a hodge-podge of notes and Excel tables. An efficient planning and control system which decreases lead times and increases productivity originated from isolated solutions. Since the implementation of the abas Business Software we have quadrupled our turnover without considerably increasing personnel. Without this system we would have to have a lot more personnel and with the existing production costs we would no longer be able to compete," say both managers unanimously.