KUKA Roboter adopts BOARD for consistent sales and production planning

KUKA Roboter GmbH is counting on the all-in-one toolkit BOARD to stay on track with the Group’s ambitious global growth strategy, hoping to hit the 4 billion sales mark by 2020.

As one of the world’s leading suppliers of robots and automated production systems and solutions, the company wanted to implement a organisation-wide monthly-rolling sales and production planning process. Its intention is to stabilize production efficiency, reduce delivery times, lower stocks, and provide a meaningful common data basis for controlling, sales, and supply chain management. In its aim, KUKA sought an IT system which could map the entire process, from strategic planning and finance, to sales and production planning. A structured, common SAP data basis was needed for the Controlling, Sales, and Supply departments, as well as suitable input and evaluation functions to cover any planning and analysis need the departments may have.

The Swiss toolkit BOARD was chosen because of its extensive analytical functions as well as its simple customizing options for databases in terms of getting the right planning functionality.

The all-in-one platform unifies the strategic, sales, production, workforce and procurement planning as well as profit and loss, investment, and balance sheet planning into an integrated business planning.

Using BOARD benefits KUKA from a superior planning quality, accuracy, and transparency. All planning processes are fully transparent and strictly aligned with the overall corporate strategy. Detailed analyses enable the company to quickly compare plans for specific market segments, products, or countries to the agreed medium-term strategy, so that any necessary corrective action can be taken while planning is still in progress.

“We now have a standardized and resource-saving planning process that’s in tune with the corporate strategy”, says Axel Flechtenmacher, Director Global Planning & Logistics at KUKA Roboter GmbH. “With the globally standard BOARD-based workflow we can get a status on the planning results at any time and identify in which planning stage we are. Data changes can be done in the system itself and are automatically applied to plans and reports. “Not least due to the challenges stirred up by the latest developments in the automotive industry, this flexibility is priceless.”