Franke Industrie AG

Firing on All Cylinders with proALPHA

Burning hot is just the right temperature for Franke Industrie AG. For 60 years, the Swiss company has manufactured heat-resistant components such as combustion chambers, nozzles, flame tubes, and guide vanes. Having to resist temperatures of up to 1,200° Celsius, these hot gas parts are used in gas turbines in the energy and aerospace industry. They are anything but standard. Their lot sizes are proof of this, too: they range between 1 and 300 at the maximum. On average, their manufacture takes nine months, from the time a quote is issued to the day the shipment leaves. Europe and the USA are Franke Industrie's most important markets. The company has an export share of almost 100 percent.

Franke Industrie competes with numerous mid-sized suppliers for a relatively small number of only 100 customers in the market worldwide, among them Siemens, GE, and MAN. proALPHA helps the company gain an edge over its competitors. The integrated document management system DMS is of great benefit to Franke Industrie: it ensures that all documents are readily available, be it scans, supplier invoices or certificates. Moreover, the proALPHA WorkflowManagement helps automate business processes in purchasing, production, assembly, and sales.

Effectively Managing Thousands of Drawings

The manufacture of components involves a largenumber of documents, such as invoices, shipping documents, bills of materials, drawings, logs, material certificates, and inspection reports. The document management system integrated in proALPHA allows Franke Industrie to store all of these documents in digital form. They can then be assigned to business transactions using drag and drop. "We use the proALPHA DMS throughout the entire company. It has helped us enormously to reduce the effort involved in archiving and filing documents," says Markus Fretz, Head of Production at Franke Industrie. "Our employees always have relevant documents at hand, regardless of whether they work in sales, production or accounting." They can access these documents by using the corresponding receipt in proALPHA or the search functions provided in the DMS.

Documents created in proALPHA are automatically labeled with barcodes and archived. Franke Industrie generates 8,000 barcodes per year. This number also includes external documents, of which several hundreds are received every day. In the afternoon, they are collected, scanned, and stored in proALPHA. Consequently any document is available in electronic form one day after it was created or received at the latest. Franke Industrie relies on this function especially when providing quality certificates for the raw materials it processes, such as nickel and cobalt alloys. The company has to send these certificates to customers together with finished components. Missing or inaccurate certificates might sour customer relationships. It is therefore crucial to ensure and fully document the components' quality.

Drawings management is very popular with Franke Industrie's employees, too. It allows them to efficiently manage CAD drawings, engineering drawings as well as pictures and graphics and add them to a product file. Franke Industrie creates more than 10,000 drawings per year. It is also possible to assign bills of materials to the drawings. This is especially useful when communicating with suppliers. When orders are sent to suppliers, proALPHA ensures that the right documents are provided, too. Since specifications are clear from the outset, fewer errors occur.