Lechler Caps Customer Service with Ingres-Powered ERP Solution

SUCCESS STORY HIGHLIGHTS

If you need a nozzle or specialized device for dispensing air, spray paint, pesticides, chemicals, solvents, desulphurization products, or just plain water, Lechler GmbH is the manufacturer for you. This German mid-sized company with a global presence specializes in four key areas of liquid distribution: agriculture, environmental technology, metallurgy, and general industry. When Lechler needed to revamp its company-wide manufacturing technology solution, it invested in a manufacturing resource planning (MRP) system from Planat GmbH built on Ingres Database, a leading open source database for business-critical applications and deployed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Today, Lechler employees worldwide depend on the company's Ingres Database-driven enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution to tap into key data for sales, technology, manufacturing, employee, and process control applications.

CHALLENGE

Founded in 1879, Lechler nurtures unparalleled expertise in the development and production of nozzles and custom spray technology solutions. Lechler engineers its specialty products for a wide range of markets with applications in manufacturing, environmental engineering, and agriculture. Industries served include steel, pulp and paper processing, power plants, cement manufacturing, food processors, pharmaceutical facilities, chemical plants, wastewater treatment, and any manufacturing plant that needs to spray fluid or air.

Delivering more than 30,000 standard products as well as the capability to manufacture custom orders, Lechler aims to apply state-of-the-art development and continuous process improvement to ensure quality deliverables. In launching its MRP initiative and later upgrading to an ERP solution powered by Ingres Database, Lechler set the major goals of improving its business processes, enhancing and extending its reporting options, and ensuring flexibility in its database administration. Ultimately, the company seeks to continuously improve customer service, and minimize the time from order to delivery.

SOLUTION

Deployed as part of the company's ERP solution, Ingres Database is central to Lechler's IT strategy. When end users across all four sales divisions of Lechler use the new ERP system, they are assured of stable, readily available data - thanks to Ingres Database. This business-critical database supports ERP applications that address all of Lechler's key business requirements - process control, sales, marketing, and operational. "Ingres Database and our ERP system are essential parts of our global IT implementation," says Marcus Kuhn, IT manager at Lechler GmbH. "Before we switched to Ingres, we were working with a huge data processing center and everything was very inflexible," says Kuhn. After switching to an ERP system with Ingres Database at its foundation, Lechler strengthened its business processes and reporting capabilities. "The ERP system and Ingres Database is the core of our business," says Kuhn.

RESULTS

Worldwide, about 600 Lechler employees access the company's Ingres Databasesupported ERP applications. All levels of employees, from executives to department heads to data entry personnel, use Ingres Database via the ERP system, accessing reports, tracking customer orders, and processing data according to each end user's particular role. Kuhn notes that Lechler employees can run queries against the Ingres Database-powered ERP system. "The entire reporting for the users is much more efficient because they can run their own queries," he says. "They can download information to an Excel file, and the efforts for the IT department to provide information is greatly reduced. This is definitely an important benefit of the overall Ingres Database solution."

Availability and stability of Ingres Database continues to be extremely important to Lechler. "In combination with our overall IT strategy and ERP system, Ingres Database certainly improves the overall competitiveness of our company quite substantially - there is no doubt about it," says Kuhn. He points to the process improvement achieved with the combination of Ingres Database and ERP. "With our new processes, we improved performance quite substantially. So, even for complex project orders, our new system, powered by Ingres Database, enables us to be at least 50% faster in responding to customers."

Kuhn observes, "All the major goals that we had - to improve the flexibility of the database administration, to strenghthen our reporting skills and reporting options, and to improve our business processes - all that can be implemented in combination with our ERP system and Ingres. Ingres Database, especially in terms of reporting features, was a great help in meeting our goals. It's also a very important facet of our overall IT strategy."

.Lechler's IT strategy also sustains the primary goal of delivery top customer service. "We believe that with the competitiveness and power of our ERP system, we can bring better service to our customers, which improves our overall competitiveness," concludes Kuhn. "Ingres Database is a cornerstone of that solution."