The Mäder Group installed a new companywide SAP®-integrated labelling system, in use in Switzerland, Germany and France: OPAL LABELMANAGEMENT™ in combination with SAP® EH&S and the existing industrial printers.
THE CUSTOMER
Reliable labelling for industrial coatings
As a leading producer of industrial coatings, decoration colours and composite materials, Mäder must ensure the reliable labelling of all produced materials. That calls for an experienced partner: one with expertise in printer connection and configuration, in layout design – and above all in printing from SAP®.
The task: prepare the centralised management of labels, printers and print data. On top of that, this quite critical process requires collecting all relevant EH&S information for the respective materials per print task – which means direct access to the data of the SAP® EH&S module.
THE SOLUTION
SAP®-integrated LABELMANAGEMENT with BarTender®
After intensive research, the choice fell on the SAP®-integrated LABELMANAGEMENT developed by the AutoID system integrator OPAL, which can access the SAP® EH&S module and works with the label software BarTender® by Seagull Scientific. Labels are printed quickly and error-free on almost all label printers available on the market.
In 2015, the OPAL LABELMANAGEMENT™ system was installed in the Mäder companies in Switzerland (Killwangen), then in Germany (Strullendorf, Gelsenkirchen) together with France. As some rollout decisions were taken at short notice, OPAL faced the challenge of connecting the SAP® EH&S module while implementing simultaneously at several sites within 6 weeks. Good cooperation between the partners resulted in full implementation by the planned go-live date.
THE CHALLENGE
Several countries, one SAP® system, separate processes
Connecting several sites to one central SAP® system requires a system that manages multiple print processes separately – and prints very large amounts of data from SAP® EH&S, including pictograms.
OPAL LABELMANAGEMENT™ enables a separate print server at each site and keeps the processes separate in SAP® – not only for the print job, but for the entire ABAP class responsible for data gathering and print preparation. Potential malfunctions can thus be limited to individual sites by correcting the layout or enhancing the print classes, despite the central SAP® system.
THE INTEGRATION
Connecting the SAP® EH&S module
The main challenge was to correctly read the enormous amount of information from the SAP® EH&S module per material – and to combine it in several languages on one label. For this, OPAL provides a standardised EH&S master class for LABELMANAGEMENT that can read all SAP® EH&S-relevant data for a material.
The configuration is child’s play in relation to the effort: all relevant information is set up by maintaining a configuration table prepared by OPAL and invoked in a label class with user-friendly LABELMANAGEMENT-specific functions. After a relatively low amount of effort, the first print job with SAP® EH&S data could be executed.
Do you need reliable, SAP®-integrated labelling across several sites – including EH&S data? We bring the experience from projects like Mäder to your rollout.
