Patent-strong start-up from the technology industry digitizes processes
based on SAP Business One Cloud
ecoCOAT was founded in 2017 as a surface treatment service provider and sells its products to OEMs from the automotive industry to household appliance manufacturers. From the initial consultation to the end of the product life cycle, ecoCOAT offers its customers customized surfaces, including for soldering materials, heat conductors, and cleaning systems.
Enrico Flade, founder and managing director of ecoCOAT, is a young and ambitious family man who can already look back on a successful career in the research and development of coating technologies. His experience, including at the Fraunhofer Institute, has contributed to the startup's ability to register numerous patents within a very short period of time and, based on these, to develop numerous high-tech solutions for innovative and sustainable products.
Why SAP Business One, why conesprit?
ecoCOAT has been using SAP Business One Cloud since mid-2021. A total of five licenses are currently in use, and additional licenses can be purchased at any time. Enrico Flade already had experience with SAP and comparable ERP systems, so the implementation and use did not pose any major challenges for him and his team. Therefore, the entire conesprit training program was not utilized. Roman Douverne, Managing Director of conesprit, describes the training required for ecoCOAT prior to using SAP Business One: "Mr. Flade had excellent SAP user knowledge right from the start and was able to quickly acquire further, more in-depth knowledge through our training materials. This was one of the reasons why the implementation went so quickly and smoothly."
Why a cloud solution?
Using SAP Business One as a cloud-based solution has many advantages: The system is proven and is continuously being developed further by SAP. SAP Business One Cloud is always up-to-date and mobile, can be operated without a dedicated IT department, and is therefore not only cost-effective to acquire, but also to maintain and support. Another major advantage is that you can start with just a few users and gradually add or remove users as needed. This creates maximum flexibility for companies. These aspects are precisely what are important for ecoCOAT, which is growing rapidly and therefore has multiple branches and production sites. The cloud solution has proven particularly useful during the global Covid-19 pandemic, which is also partly responsible for mobile working becoming an integral part of numerous industries.
How does SAP Business One demonstrate its strength in production?
Production planning at ecoCOAT is warehouse-driven and based on multi-stage production processes. At ecoCOAT, the production process is optimized using a customized template for production orders and the associated warehouse processing. The planning assistant, used daily by ecoCOAT, identifies which components need to be ordered so that these production orders can be fulfilled. The planning assistant helps ecoCOAT reduce errors, inventory levels, and thus warehousing costs.
ecoCOAT works with the conesprit fulfillment terminal. As soon as a customer order is created and approved, a work order is visible to the shipping staff in logistics. Using a picking list called up on a scanner, the items for the order are compiled. Once all items are packed, the delivery note, invoice, and DHL shipping label are created and printed with a single click. The intuitively designed terminal reduces the processing time for a customer order.
"Until the introduction of the fulfillment terminal, we had to access the DHL website for each individual package, manually enter the customer's address information, and then laboriously print out the shipping label. Now we have the label at the touch of a button, because our DHL login details are linked to the conesprit terminal. This not only saves us a lot of time but also money," explains Enrico Flade, describing the current process step.
We have summarized more about the advantages of SAP Business One Cloud in production as well as about the company and its further objectives in our reference eBook.
"In the production environment, SAP Business One Cloud is simply unbeatable – simply because of the easy customization of standard processes and the numerous interfaces."
Enrico Flade – Managing Director ecoCOAT GmbH
Read the entire customer reference as an eBook
