All statistics point to the same conclusion—the world’s growth areas for the corrugated packaging industry are in Asia and in Eastern Europe and will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. With foresight, Kiwiplan customer Constantia Duropack, as part of its business strategy, is expanding into its own “backyard,” the growth area of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe.
The Constantia Duropack Group
In the Corrugated Board segment, the Constantia Duropack Group produces and distributes all types of corrugated board packaging and various specialty products, such as heavy-duty corrugated board, point-of-sale displays, and specialty containers.
The Constantia Duropack Group’s main markets include Austria, Germany, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Serbia and Bulgaria. Recently it purchased 20% of stock for Belisce, a company with facilities in the former Yugoslavian countries.
Duropack AG is a 100% subsidiary of Constantia Packaging AG which is listed on the Austrian stock exchange.
The Duropack Strategy
The fully integrated order-to-cash solution from Kiwiplan, comprised of the modules making up the Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Enterprise Sales Processing (ESP), helped Duropack tailor its day-to-day business for what is needed in a dynamic company for both production and sales. SAP solutions including MM and FI/CO form the financial backbone which are fully interfaced with their Kiwiplan solution.
To ensure success, Duropack set out to change its business practices by using Kiwiplan to manage the planning and data from its isolated business units. This required a top-down “buy-in,” understanding, promotion and support throughout the whole management and Duropack employee team. One key operational change was the change to an area concept from an individual plant focus. This effort required a work re-design in sales and customer service starting with the two Austrian sites. As Franz- Rene Saiko, General Manager Austria, says, “Together with Kiwiplan, we were able to coordinate our sales and logistical efforts as well as both production sites seamlessly across our Austrian businesses.”
The Duro Force
The Duropack corporate Process Management team is the group leading the implementation phases of Kiwiplan and has been involved since the beginning of the project. The team consists of five members each responsible for a certain process area. The Process Management team is lead by Thomas Langthaler, along with his four members, Johannes Berghofer, Predrag Lekic, Kurt Schadl, and Christoph Lauer. Over the past two years this team has installed the fully integrated order-to-cash solution from Kiwiplan in four plants in three countries.
Local Force
The corporate Duropack team involves teams from the local plants at a very early stage. This allows the plant time to clean up data and prepare for the upcoming install. The Process Management team believes that this local involvement pays significant dividends in both acceptance and use of the new systems.
The Infrastructure
Duropack has developed a centralized IT solution with their sites connected via a virtual route. All of their infrastructure setups are geared towards efficiency and being environmentally friendly. Duropack strives to reduce the consumption of energy by using virtual machines instead of using physical servers. This has proven to be fast, efficient and also robust for fail-over situations. This centralized IT solution has become possible with a dramatic improvement in technology, greatly surpassing what was available only four to five years earlier.
The Kiwiplan Drive
In the fast-growing European corrugated marketplace within and outside the EU, Constantia Duropack intends to be the most effective and competitive force around. Duropack operates currently in nine countries and is still growing or looking for opportunities to grow. The Kiwiplan product line, in particular the fully integrated order-to-cash solution with MES and ESP, directly contributes to the success at Duropack. Langthaler states: “Kiwiplan offers the best integrated solution for packaging to manage the demands across our expanding European marketplace.”
The successful implementations Langthaler and his Process Management team have achieved, coupled with their ability to harness the capabilities of the Kiwiplan systems, will ensure a bright future. Congratulations to Constantia Duropack.