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Émilie Delvoye, Director of Communications at Prompt, welcomes Alexis Barbarot from Premier Tech Systèmes Automatisés to discuss a project to improve interoperability between digital systems.
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Émilie: Today, I’m talking to Alexis Barbarot, Digital Strategy Manager at Premier Tech Systèmes Automatisés (PTSA), a manufacturing company that offers packaging and palletizing systems for a wide range of industries. Premier Tech is part of a group of companies with over 60 manufacturing facilities and more than 6,000 active team members in 31 countries. Hello Alexis.
Alexis Barbarot: Hello, Émilie.
Émilie: So today we’re going to talk about a project to improve interoperability between digital systems. Can you tell us how this project got off the ground?
Alexis Barbarot: Yes, the trigger for this project came from a need to manage our configurations. For our products at Premier Tech Systèmes Automatisés, we have a wide range, a big catalog with lots of options and lots of features. And we have machines that last over time. Today, we have around 30,000 machines in operation worldwide. Some of these machines are over 25 years old. That’s why we had to integrate a configurator and what we’ll call the Configit CLM throughout the podcast. The CLM is a configurator. The LM part is the configuration lifecycle management part. From there, our machines evolve all the time, because in our field, packaging evolves in terms of materials and formats. Our robots evolve, and we have to be able to keep up with that too. The need for a configurator arose at the same time as a new product we launched at PTSA: the Thomas, a collaborative robot. For this collaborative robot, we also wanted to use an online configurator to make it a little easier for our customers to select the robot and order it directly over the Internet.
Émilie: When you started this project, you had a surprise.
Alexis Barbarot: Indeed, from the moment we wanted to roll out the strategy we had developed for Thomas to the rest of PTSA. We reached a point where our system urbanization didn’t allow us to properly integrate a configurator as powerful as Configit at CLM level. As a result, we had to completely rethink the urbanization of our systems. We also had to rethink our data life cycle, from design to execution. And then from there, we started again to make all our transactions between our systems. Then, we started from a very simple observation: to make all our large systems communicate: PLM, which is our electronic document management, i.e. plans with technical data, our RP, which is there for all plant resources, i.e. resource planning, and then our CRM, which is customer management. Having these large systems communicate with each other via Excel spreadsheets was no longer good for us. We started to make transactions between all these systems in order to build a very solid foundation, with a quality of data that today enables us to lay a CLM in a robust way on this foundation.
Émilie: So, what’s the impact of all the work you’ve put into this project?
Alexis Barbarot: So, the impact is major. Firstly, from the moment we completely rethought our lifecycle and our digital processes to support the business, we managed to free up time for the business. And that’s quite simply because all those tasks that had very little value, i.e. copying and pasting Excel sheets to extract them from one system and reinject them into the other, were taking up a lot of time. It was also a major source of errors. From that point on, we’ve had a fairly positive impact on the team members directly in terms of working conditions, since we’ve given them time to improve their own processes and methods, with a view to continuous improvement. We’ve also had a positive impact on our customers, since for the Thomas, we have this website with a configurator where each of our customers can configure all the robot’s possibilities and options, a bit like when you configure a car on the Internet, and can produce an online order for a collaborative robot. One of the big impacts we’ve also had is on our data quality. Today, we have better data quality in execution on the factory floor, which means that one of the side-effects we have, and which is very eco-responsible, is that we have fewer reworkings, fewer rejects either, so we have fewer parts that will have to be reworked or thrown away to be completely restarted from scratch. So, our quality of execution has increased thanks to this overhaul of our systems urbanization.
Émilie: So you really went looking for positive impacts, both externally and internally.
Alexis Barbarot: Exactly, yes. What really drove us externally was to have a good configurator that enabled each customer to configure his machine, and also to be able to guide it correctly, since by multiplying the number of options on our machines, we also multiply the number of risks of having options that don’t match. The configurator brings all these rules into play. The very positive side-effect that we’re going to have internally is that we’ve freed up time for our team members, who will now have more time to carry out tasks that are important to them. At the end of the day, people don’t really care about doing Excel spreadsheets all day long.
Émilie: Excellent! So, what motivates you to innovate and then work on this kind of project?
Alexis Barbarot: The motivation I have, and I share it with my whole team, is that our aim is to keep up with innovation, which is perpetual at Premier Tech, since our technical innovation on our machines is in line with customer and market demands. Behind us, at the digital level, we have to be there to support this innovation with digital solutions that are always on trend. Our aim is also to always bring a touch of the avant-garde, to have a positive effect on our team members, enabling them to be a little more efficient, to free up a little more time. And thanks to this, they’ll have the time to innovate in their field, which will bring us two new challenges that will push us to innovate even further. So we’re on a never-ending wheel of innovation at Premier Tech. And it’s always like a tennis match between the business and our digital side. We’re constantly innovating, all the time together.
Émilie: A beautiful virtuous wheel. Thank you so much Alexis for sharing. If you too have ideas for digital innovation projects to help your company evolve, I invite you to contact Prompt today.
