Manroland Sheetfed

New Webshop for Wear Parts - Premium class offset printing

Manroland Sheetfed is a leading international manufacturer of offset printing presses in manual and package printing and publishing. Founded more than 168 years ago and based on a solid German engineering, the name Manroland with its comprehensive offset solutions is a worldwide synonym for high quality, precision and outstanding reliability.

The company is part of the British Langley Holdings Plc, a global engineering conglomerate, whose technologies can be found in the heart of many an industrial and commercial process.

One of the reasons for the perpetual drive of Manroland for innovation and product development, is the search for special solutions to meet the ever-changing customer needs. As a Manroland customer one not only buys a printing press, but also invests in an evolving system, which will bring added value to the company in the future. With Manroland inline systems, QuickChange technologies and Select Systems the variety of machines is unique. Almost all machines can print on cardboard and a large number of other substrates, without having to select optional features. This expands the possible range of products for the printer greatly and thus his chances on the market.

Under the name "Print Services" Manroland offers its customers a variety of services and consultancy that is unparalleled in depth and intensity. With a wide variety of service programs around the printing press, and with fine-tuned process-compliant system components under the name of "Printcom", Manroland ensures the highest quality over the life span of the machine and gets value for money.

Context

An existing webshop should be replaced, because the creation process was very time-consuming. The entire BOM was compared with a self-programmed database and thus a machine-related products list was created. This process had to be done manually for each machine. The item prices were maintained in SAP. Next, the machine-related items list and the corresponding JPG-images were loaded in the web application in a machine-related manner. This process had to be done for each new customer, requiring a correspondingly long time.

A total of over 400 catalogs, each with about 220 components, was created.

Requirements

Service technicians and customers expect from Manroland a modern web shop that is easy and intuitive to use and offers very fast response times. A fully automated technical clarification of the machine-related parts should therefore be possible.

For Manroland the fully automatic filling of the system from SAP without any manual effort was a fundamental requirement. Great value was placed on the graphical display options, e.g. multiple images per item.

Solution

As a basis for the new "Wear Parts Store" served the self-programmed database, in which machine-related, individual parts lists are available for each machine. All images are now stored directly on the web server. A SAP-application provides a flexible and fully automated upload to the web directory, both for producing new catalogs and updating existing catalogs. Prices are updated automatically at specified intervals. An interface from the shop to the ERP system of the service partner provides automatic generation of purchase orders, contracts and delivery notes, so that only the actual logistics process and the invoice to the customer have to be performed manually.

Conclusion

In particular the technical clarification of machine-specific spare parts was greatly simplified through the project with the CATALOGcreator®. Highlights of the solution include:

• The fully automatic creation process of the catalogs
• The short response time of the system
• The identification of spare parts has become easier through the graphical displays
• Succession materials are directly displayed using corresponding functions
• The convenient search options

The next step of the webshop will be rolled out worldwide and provided with individual customer prices in local currencies.

"The collaboration with Bernd Weigelt, the project manager of TID proved to be very positive. Both meeting the deadlines and the flexibility during the project phase made the entire project successful, and on schedule.”

Jürgen Schleinkofer, Head of Products and Markets at manroland sheetfed GmbH