Success Story Fahrzeugwerk Bernard Krone GmbH

Automated document composition for Fahrzeugwerk Bernard Krone GmbH

Documents play a key part in the production and sales processes at Fahrzeugwerk Bernard Krone GmbH. The company, based in the German federal state of Lower Saxony, is using an output management solution for the automated composition of around 22,000 documents a month, some of which are highly complex. The solution was successfully adapted to the new environment during the switch from an AS/400 based system to SAP. Thanks to a fast, seamless conversion, the system now has a new bidirectional interface.

They are everywhere you look on rural roads and freeways: trailers and semi-trailers with KRONE written on the side. Krone has been manufacturing commercial vehicles in Werlte, in Germany’s Emsland region, since 1971. Along with Maschinenfabrik Bernard Krone GmbH and Landtechnik Vertrieb und Dienstleistungen Bernard Krone GmbH, Fahrzeugwerk Bernard Krone GmbH is part of the Krone Group. The company already has a tradition of over 100 years, and its product portfolio includes curtain siders, insulated trailers and semi-trailers, container chassis, swap bodies, carriers and superstructures. Over 1,000 employees manufactured around 40,000 vehicles at the company headquarters during the financial year 2007/2008. This makes Krone the second largest commercial vehicle manufacturer in Europe. The company currently has national sales partners in 35 European countries.

Vehicle manufacturer produces many different types of documents

As a vehicle manufacturer with a wide range of products, Krone uses many different  types of document in its production and sales processes. These include manufacturing and parameterization data sets, registration documents (which differ depending on the vehicle’s country of destination), homologation certificates and reports, all sorts of certificates proving the vehicle’s structural stability or special documentation for refrigerated transport vehicles, such as applications, labels and permit plates.

Many mistakes during individual composition of complex documents

Until around two years ago, Krone was using an AS/400 based system as its application platform for document composition. Initially, documents were still composed manually or using the mail merge function, which involved accessing Excel and Word files, as well as data from the production planning and control systems that were used at the time. IBM Text and MS Word were used for word processing and data was gathered manually in order papers and parts lists. As well as the large amount of work that was involved in document composition, the fact that data was saved on local or central directory systems that were incompatible with each other also proved to be disadvantageous. A significant increase in the number of orders meant that this practice was no longer appropriate.

“The number of documents we need to compose has increased considerably over the years, partly due to technical progress and changes in the law,” explains Franz Schmitz of Fahrzeugwerk Bernard Krone GmbH’s technical office. “The workload increased considerably, but training new staff in this area always took a very long time. Furthermore, mistakes were often made during the manual, individual composition of complex documents, that’s simply in the nature of the task. These documents then needed to be checked and reworked, which also further increased production costs. In principle, the structure of a lot of our documents contained relatively simple, recurring regularities, which meant they could easily be automated. The thing that we were lacking back then was a way of selecting the required data dynamically from the available data sources and then using a simple process to convert them into documents suitable for archiving and printing.”

ITP: flexibility in output and printing

Krone eventually found the right solution for this situation in Aia Software’s ITP (Intelligent Text Processing) output management platform. A range of factors helped them decide on this system, including the fact that normal Windows PCs can be used as a hardware platform for the composition of document templates (models) and subsequent further processing. Krone’s IT managers were also impressed by the software’s flexibility in output and printing, supported by all sorts of formats and options, as well as the relatively simple programming language, which limited the amount of training employees needed. Another advantage was that formatting could be converted directly using Word and diagrams, graphics and drawings could be incorporated easily.

However, the output solution's flexibility was only first really put to the test when Krone switched from its previous AS/400 platform to Unix and SAP R/3. During this conversion, a highly efficient interface between ITP and SAP needed to be created to enable further use of the solution. This was no easy task, since raw data for the documents needed to be taken from the SAP system, as well as the documents produced having to be permanently stored in the SAP document management system in a time-controlled manner. However, together with Aia Software, Krone’s IT department managed to make the necessary modifications to the application and therefore switch to the new platform.

Interactive documents of consistently high quality

In practice, Krone staff now use one of a range of special, individually configurable menus in ITP, depending on what they want to do, to launch the composition of the required documents or files. Depending on the type of document, dialog boxes are used for interaction between the user and the system. Employees only need to be trained in the composition of templates and model documents. Users who work with automatically generated documents merely need basic PC skills. Another advantage for Krone, is that the quality of documents is consistently high, which would not be possible if they were composed manually. This is extremely important, since a lot of the documents to be composed are vehicle documents and certificates which are subject to strict legal guidelines on the layout, structure and content.

Do more work with the same amount of staff

“We were pleasantly surprised that ITP could be connected to the new SAP system so smoothly,” sums up Schmitz. “Since the bidirectional connection between ITP and SAP was partly still new for those performing the implementation, we had reckoned with a higher expenditure for the conversion and even allowed for the event that we'd have to switch to a totally different output system. In principle, we wouldn’t be able to manage the volume of work we have today in many of the company’s departments without automated document composition. For example, in 2008 we were producing around 22,000 documents and files every month in this area. It is a massive advantage that each complex requirement now only really needs to be thought through properly once and modeled in ITP. Our staff can then produce completely correct documents, practically at the click of a button.”

Further expansion of the existing installation is being considered for the future, and this may include the implementation of the ITP/OnLine Server and ITP/MDK Repository. Krone hopes that this could bring additional improvements to the release processes for the model documents and the document history management. The use of ITP/OnLine Server would also enable the vehicle manufacturer to compose documents directly online so that installations on the individual clients are no longer necessary.