Production downtime is a huge loss to any business, so it was fantastic to see CodingControl™ help keep productions lines running, with minimum disruption, during a planned server migration at a customer site.
The drinks manufacturer was moving the data centre location for its SAP servers, which required its SAP system to be shut down for two days. While the migration to the new data centre was planned well in advance, two days of lost production at the UK site, which operates seven different production lines, would have had a severe impact on its end customers.
While the physical production was not affected by the migration programme, the finished goods could not be inputted into SAP, with manually recording the manufacturing outputs an option considered. By utilsing CodingControl, all pallets could be recorded and subsequently updated in SAP once it was active again.
CodingControl is fully integrated with SAP EWM and Markem-Image pallet software, CoLOS, and enables accurate data to be printed onto finished pallets. Through CoLOS scanning the labels to verify the pallet and transferring the data to CodingControl, this is then issued directly to SAP for accurate goods receipt.
To facilitate the continued production during the server migration, our team worked closely with the customer’s internal team to plan for the two-day shut down. The production schedule was carefully planned and inputted into CodingControl prior to SAP being shut down, to ensure all the order data was available during the downtime period. Once each pallet had been completed, labelled and verified, CoLOS sent the data to CodingControl, where it was stored until the systems were back up and running.
Once SAP was live, CodingControl updated SAP with the 3,600 pallets that had been produced over the two days to enable that data to flow through into SAP EWM for goods receipt processing. Utilising CodingControl enabled the customer to continue its operation without disruption, avoided significant extra resource and time that would have come with manually recording pallets and maintained stock accuracy and traceability through the site.
Commenting on the project, our Technical Team Lead, Brett Malen said: “We are delighted we were able to help the customer navigate a challenging couple of days and demonstrate the capabilities of CodingControl. This would not have been possible without clear planning and preparation and the internal team was fantastic in helping to prepare for this with the production schedule. This is a really busy time of year for the customer and it simply could not stop production, so the fact that it could not only maintain operations, with no dip in production output, but also process those goods as soon as SAP was back up and running was a massive boost.”
For further information on CodingControl, or any of our other innovative SAP solutions, please get in touch with our SAP supply chain specialists.