MEUSBURGER GEORG GMBH & CO. KG

industry

Tool, mold and mechanical engineering

Department

Sales, production, logistics

Region

Wolfurt, Austria

The customer

Founded by Georg Meusburger in 1964 as a one-man business for tool and mold making, Meusburger Georg GmbH & Co KG is today considered the market leader in the field of high-precision standard parts. In addition to its headquarters in Wolfurt, Austria, the family-owned company operates sales offices in Turkey, China, the USA, Mexico and India and employs more than 1000 people. In addition to an extensive range of standard parts, the product spectrum includes a large selection of products for workshop requirements. The approximately 80,000 different articles are used by more than 15,000 customers all over the world.

Initial situation

The corporate culture of Meusburger Georg GmbH & Co KG includes knowledge management in addition to the classic production factors of labour, capital and land. Knowledge on a wide variety of topics is systematically recorded, distributed, further developed and secured. “We want to provide all employees in the company with the information they need to successfully complete their tasks,” explains Guntram Meusburger, owner and managing director of Meusburger Georg GmbH & Co KG. “To do this, we link people with organisation and technology.”

In this context, the company planned to optimise the provision of key figures, analyses and reports based on data from the IT systems used in the company. Instead of being based on Excel as before, the provision of data from ERP, MES and CRM systems as well as corresponding evaluations was to be automated via a dedicated business intelligence system.

Meusburger attached particular importance to the highest possible degree of freedom of use on the part of the specialist departments. Employees should be able to access information relevant to them at any time in a self-service process independent of the IT department. The solution had to be correspondingly uncomplicated to use, flexible in its analyses and diverse in its visualisation options.

Solution

Following a recommendation from industry circles, Meusburger opted for the QlikView data discovery solution. The storage-based analysis and reporting approach of this self-service BI solution enables access to all relevant data from any source system in the form of graphical, interactive dashboards that any user can quickly create and easily modify. Employees can "surf" their data with complete freedom, even without in-depth IT expertise, and harness it at top speed to make informed and proactive decisions.

"QlikView was exactly the answer to our initial question 'How can we help ourselves with data in the specialist departments as easily as possible'," emphasizes Tobias Fuchs, Head of Sales Controlling Department, Meusburger Georg GmbH & Co KG.

The fact that the success of a BI project is not only a question of the right tool, but also the right partner, was also a clear case for Meusburger, which is why the Vorarlberg company once again relied on a recommendation - and was not disappointed: ppmc AG ensured professional project realization from the creation of the data model to implementation and application development to user training. The Liechtenstein-based Qlik solution provider not only convinced Meusburger with its comprehensive BI expertise with well-founded technology competence regarding all IT systems used at Meusburger and many years of project experience. Another plus point was the close proximity.

Areas of application and benefits

Within a few weeks, the first application for sales went live. Among other things, analyses of sales and turnover according to criteria such as region, customer and article, including comparisons with the previous year, as well as the measurement of the success of new product promotions are displayed. In addition, customer visits are evaluated via QlikView. "In the past, we compiled tables from raw data with a correspondingly high level of manual effort using various macros," says Fuchs, looking back. "Today, the data is available automatically. In addition, we can run much deeper and broader analyses - so it's straightforward to map how a customer's sales have developed over the past few years."

After it was proven in practice how easily QlikView supports employees in decision-making, applications were introduced for other departments. For example, for the analysis of machine data. "We can now condense data on individual machines to machine groups and this in turn to departments and high to areas. If a performance deviation crops up, we can get in at management level and drill down to the individual machine, instead of having to check each machine individually in Excel as we used to," explains Martin Lenz, who is responsible for QlikView in the logistics and production departments at Meusburger Georg GmbH & Co KG.

In addition, the standard parts manufacturer is also able to map complex production key figures around topics such as occupancy times, availability, effectiveness and quality rate. QlikView is also used in the personnel area, for example for the analysis and consolidation of working hours.

Around 80 employees now use the BI solution for analyses. QlikView is not only "well received" by the specialist departments; IT also benefits from the self-service approach of the BI solution.

Future

In terms of both tool and partner, Meusburger considers itself perfectly equipped for the future. "QlikView has established itself as our standard tool for key figures, analyses and reports. In the future, we will expand existing applications and also develop new applications for other areas of the company," says Tobias Kalkschmid, IT-Business Software - Responsible for QlikView at Meusburger Georg GmbH & Co KG.

In addition, centrally generated key figures, analyses and weekly and monthly reports will be made available via QlikView NPrinting in the future. With this tool, visually appealing QlikView reports can be created simply by dragging and dropping and distributed in formats such as PDF or HTML.