ECLASS gives your processes a common foundation. In this way, procurement, service provision, sales and company management benefit at the same time.
Rationalization and digitization are bringing an increasing degree of transparency to procurement and sales processes. This is first and foremost an opportunity – particularly for companies that not only produce high-quality goods, but also rely on standards.
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A real-world example is ultimately the most compelling argument. A few examples should illustrate just how broad the areas of use are, and how complex the problems addressed with the help of ECLASS can be.
With its adoption of the standard, Lufthansa wanted to create more transparency within the group, seeking particularly to reorganize the compartmentalized world of purchasing. An impenetrable system for order and stock numbers had made it impossible to obtain an overview. ECLASS enabled the company to leverage considerable synergies, through which the organization was once again brought closer together. A new goods-group hierarchy, which is mandatory throughout the company, restructures procurement, streamlines purchasing and significantly reduces procurement costs.
Soennecken, a leading purchasing group for office-supply needs with 500 affiliated distributors, recognized early that a single data source would solve its previous deficiencies with regard to the quality of product data. Since then, the internal product platform has been designed to be able to implement every new release. With 65,000 articles from 900 producers, this makes a crucial contribution to supplying distributors successfully. Soennecken takes its work in the expert groups very seriously, and contributes actively to the sectoral standard.
Delta-V, a producer and distributor of office equipment, was tasked with producing an electronic product catalog. The Wuppertal company selected ECLASS in order to obtain a uniform data structure for this purpose. Since that time, data from its inventory management system and online shop has been combined, and the catalog is created simply by pressing a button. The simplicity and speed with which this takes place is highly valued by the customers. Many of them themselves use the data thus provided.
Siemens AG took advantage of the introduction of a central SAP solution in its oil and gas division to unify data structures and reduce process costs using ECLASS. In the process, the commodity classes were flexibly adapted to the Siemens system. Previously, a considerable amount of information was virtually unavailable due to mismatches between the search algorithms and data formats. Today, the data are standardized across locations, duplications have been eliminated, and maintenance is very straightforward. Among other elements, there is a multi-language terminology database, an interface for catalog data, and commodity-class-specific templates.
Austria’s Bundesbeschaffung (Federal Procurement Office) arranges contracts for the public sector that encompass 270,000 products and services. ECLASS helped the purchasing agency take a leading market position in tender management. While media discontinuities and manual activities previously slowed the assessment of bids, time to market has now been cut by as much as 75%. ECLASS fully supports the organization’s pan-European tenders in 16 languages. Lead time and transparency have been significantly improved, as have compliance and data security – and fewer questions are generated.
Austria-based AT&S is the leading European printed circuit-board producer. The company was faced with the problem of high capital formation and slow turnover of the components it produced. Identification of these components was not always reliable due to different designations. The implementation of ECLASS paid for itself after just seven months, impressively resulting in 44% fewer spare parts, 47% fewer suppliers, and a 20% reduction in capital commitments. The new classification structure is integrated with the SAP system, and is also available in Chinese – an important decision criterion for the global organization.
Mercateo, Europe’s leading online B2B procurement platform, manages 18 million items from more than 700 suppliers. This is good for customers that only need a single procurement platform – however, a good search function unimpeded by duplicates is critical for such use. Through the expansion of keywords to include ECLASS numbers, large customers can now create their own procurement profiles, while smaller organizations can determine where blanket purchasing contracts might benefit them, for example. The catalog entries contain detailed and evaluable data including tax rates, customs-tariff numbers, environmental labels, and so on.
B. Braun is a German manufacturer of medical technology. The decision to go with ECLASS was made on the basis of the standard’s internationally established reputation. The company sought to improve its established processes, and particularly to strengthen purchasing power and optimize inventory levels. All component master data were classified according to ECLASS, and enriched with further information. Users appreciated the simplification of the processes, and turnover increased significantly. Thanks to the reduced inventory levels, B. Braun has been better able to recognize the potential for additional component types.
Automotive component manufacturer Phoenix Contact utilized proprietary customer-side interfaces in its development of engineering processes. The company reached out to ECLASS in order to be able to manage these uniformly. Because the standard is established and highly developed, engineering data can be fed from a single source, and multiple versions can be supported in parallel. The data storage takes place centrally, and the customer can make use of this flexibly, whether for databases or catalogs.
Eight companies operate independently of one another under the Nolte Group’s roof. In this case, it was necessary to harmonize internal processes and systems. In particular, the product master data for item purchases were heterogeneous. As representative of the furniture industry, Nolte developed the new furniture segment within the ECLASS organization, thus establishing a benchmark. Suppliers are already using the system for the e-procurement platform, with a high degree of acceptance evident. Goods procurement has now been unified and simplified due to the clear hierarchy levels in the classification system. In addition, corporate management has become significantly easier.
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