Automotive Industry – Intelligent cars

Fehrer centrally controls complex, worldwide integration tasks

SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS)

The Fehrer Group is one of the world‘s leading specialists in components for vehicle interiors. The company is part of the AUNDE Group, one of the 100 largest automotive suppliers with more than 115 plants in 29 countries.

Fehrer, a satisfied SEEBURGER customer for over 30 years, uses the Business Integration Suite BIS 6 as its central data hub. It ensures the smooth flow of information from production and logistics data within the company, thus ensuring consistent processes and greater transparency. Among other things, the company uses the SEEBURGER EAI solution to control the feedback of machine/ production data in SAP and MyFSF (internally developed enterprise resource planning system). For example, manual data entry that was originally carried out at the end of a shift, has been replaced by a direct and automated process between the shop floor and the ERP system in order to access current inventory data and eliminate input errors.

Each of the 20 Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) systems worldwide is supplied with the production plan before the start of the shift, therefore providing foresight into the production metrics (via a connected PC). This PC enriches the data of the PLC with material number, cost centre, quantity and shift and generates an output file every 15 minutes, which is forwarded to SEEBURGER’s Business Integration Server (BIS) as the central data hub. Message tracking and monitoring of these processes is carried out via BIS. A workflow is triggered for each incoming file. BIS converts the data into an IDOC or CSV file and transfers it to the target systems (either the ERP or merchandise management system) and an analysis database.

Industry:
Automotive

Scenarios:
API & EAI

 

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SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite in use at Fehrer

This data is then used to generate the production confirmation in the ERP system, for example the stock entry of finished products in the warehouse, retrograde debiting according to bills of materials, tracing the production order, and backing up reporting parameters (material number, date, shift, piece) for evaluations and allocation plans (HR).

Fehrer is pioneering with its central integration approach and solves a multitude of heterogeneous EAI scenarios, such as the S7 Plantmonitor with SEEBURGER’s BIS. Here, data on plant utilisation (target/actual comparison) per production plant or cumulated at plant level are sent to an SQL server. The material usage for raw materials as well as PC test machine data is forwarded to SAP and stored for documentation purposes. Financial accounting data from SAP is transferred to subsystems for liquidity planning and work plans. Time recording data is also exchanged between the sub-system and SAP for wage determination, US financial accounting data conversion and transfer to SAP, and ASN data transfer. With BIS, Fehrer believes that it is well equipped for the increasing digitalisation of production and the use of new, flexible automation solutions to meet future integration challenges.

With our central integration approach, implemented with the Business Integration Suite (BIS), we are able to master complex requirements for internal and inter-company process harmonisation worldwide.

SEEBURGER‘s BIS Mapping Designer enables us to create individual message structures and conversion programs and to utilise message tracking with meaningful data.

Hermann Selzam, EDI IT-Business Solutions, Fehrer