EME Hydraulic is a family-owned business specialised in supplying hydraulic components to customers in the industrial manufacturing sector. The company has been around for almost 90 years and has been doing fine with manual scheduling, but the owners decided a few years ago to digitalize the company to keep quality, profitability and customer satisfaction at a high level.
An important step toward digitalization was to take production scheduling from paper and whiteboards to the ROB-EX digital platform. Susanne Provstgaard, investor in the company, says about the timing of the decision:
“To be honest, we were at a point of distress. We were forced to upgrade to digital scheduling because we were about to lose the big picture – but we also knew that sooner or later we would have to take that step and digitize the scheduling because we wanted to make our processes more efficient and allocate time to other tasks than overseeing the production.”
“It was really great that we went live with ROB-EX at the time, we did, as we were super busy. If we’ve had to do it all manually, we might had lost sight of it. And we can see now that ROB-EX is the perfect solution for us,” she explains.
A daunting but important step
Moving from manual to digital scheduling takes quite some work, but the price was always in sight. Jesper Provstgaard, the CEO, says:
“ROB-EX was meant to solve our scheduling challenges, provide us with an overview of all orders and contribute to a calmer working day. Today I will say we can’t do without it. It is so important for our customer relations that we are able to say when we will deliver. We can trust the system and avoid inventing things on the hoof. The constant state of alarm we experienced before has by and large vanished with ROB-EX.”
“Our planners now have a calm environment to do their work and they no longer have to put everything on big boards – and constantly answer all kinds of questions. All employees have access to ROB-EX where they can see the current production plan. We also have the option to print orders directly from tablets and that saves us time as well,” Jesper says.
A close partnership with ROB-EX on activation
As always, when ROB-EX delivers a scheduling solution, the activation process is carried out in close collaboration with the customer. In this case, two specialists were assigned to the task.
“It was a great experience. The process was brief and focused, and we quickly began to work and practice with our own data in our own environment. It has been a really good process and we have been guided carefully through it all,” Susanne Provstgaard explains.
“It is of great value to us that Alex and Fie from ROB-EX came here in order to understand our business, our way of working and our needs. They are very pleasant people, they know the industry we are in, and they do a good job explaining to us, how it works. The same with regards to the subsequent support. They are also easy to catch, and they provide immediate solutions.”
Focus on quality rather than extinguishing fires
The owners of EME Hydraulic are happy that they have went down the digital road with ROB-EX.
“We have succeeded in achieving the clear overview and the calm and efficient working process we dreamt of. Our employees are now always able to see what they are to do today and tomorrow. A lot of changes still happens of course, that’s how the world is, but these changes are now far easier to handle without creating chaos,” Jesper Provstgaard says. “Our employees have learnt to check the plan and to approach the schedulers to suggest optimizations of the production order to keep readjustments at a minimum. We also see that our internal communication has improved enormously.”
“Now we can concentrate on keeping an eye on product quality rather than spend all our time on scheduling,” Susanne supplements.
“Another thing is that we have been able to retain our young employees thanks to ROB-EX. I’m not sure he would have stayed with us had we carried on with manual scheduling. He is highly motivated by the fact that we run our production in a digital manner now and he regularly examines how we can improve our ROB-EX functions in order to create more value.” she concludes.