Rockwool

With an easily accessible user interface, Mark Information has developed an efficient planning tool for the company's midlevel managers who have the operational responsibility for combining orders, resources and employees. At present, Rockwool is implementing the system.

"We are still in the initial phase and thus relatively inexperienced in the use of the ProManagement system," says Preben Schmidt, Departmental Manager, Rockwool A/S in Vamdrup. "Some of the functionalities are thus not implemented yet, but at this point, it is obvious that the system is easy and speedy to work with and that it greatly improves the processes due to its vast range of practical functions."

Rockwool A/S, which employs 800 employees at its factories in Denmark, is part of the Danish owned group Rockwool International A/S that employs 7,400 employees and has a turnover of DKK 6.7 billion. The Group manufactures stone wool used for insulating buildings, industrial facilities etc.

Covers all the hourly-paid

The factory in Vamdrup is divided into five sections:

• The production line, in which stones are melted by means of excessive heat and spun to fibres that subsequently are moulded into bats or sheets of various dimensions.
• The confectionary department of which Preben Schmidt is head and in which the raw wool is further processed into specific sizes and shapes, for example by cutting wedges and manufacturing universal pipe sections.
• Warehouse
• Production control
• Maintenance respectively

"We apply the new system from Mark Information in all of the five sections, and it thus incorporates 245 hourly-paid employees," Preben Schmidt explains.

"Up to now, we have applied ProMark – from Mark Information as well – for registration of time and attendance, absence, overtime etc. These details were then, together with information of for example employees on loan to other departments, processed by our bookkeeping department. With the transition to ProManagement, the supervisors in the specific departments have been equipped with a much more comprehensive overview, and we may enter the hours more efficiently and plan more precisely in accordance with our capacity."

A significant overview

Overview is the key word for ProManagement, which is developed as a module for the rostering part of ProMark.

The module gives a comprehensive overview of the employees, the production resources and the production plans. An overview that may prove crucial to the timely delivery of the products as well as the profitability of the products. The system gives the midlevel manager the possibility of improving the utilisation of his or her resources, for example by identifying unutilised overcapacity or bottlenecks in the department and in the company.

Combination of production plan and future manning plan

ProManagement is the "ERP system" (Enterprise Resource Planning) of the budget responsible supervisor, where you can plan and manage your employee resources in accordance with the production plan generated by the company's ERP or MPC system through the combination of the resource need and the future manning plan. This kind of combination then identifies immediate discrepancies between the needs scheduled and the actual attendance schedule and thus shows the areas that need adjustment for redundant or low capacity. Last but not least, the supervisor in question may calculate the costs of a given attendance schedule for the company.

The point of departure for the rostering may vary in accordance with the company's or the department's needs. Thus the guiding parameter may be the tasks that should be performed. But if the production equipment or the employees are the scarce resources, then ProManagement may make one of these parameters the focal area for the scheduling.

Attendance schedule with the proper qualifications

You may also use rostering to adjust the employee resources across the company. So instead of having an absence budget in each department, you may have a total absence budget that is based on employees on loan among the departments in the company.

The system also lets you make the necessary arrangements based on qualifications. Generally, the staff in the companies are composed of a number of specialists – skilled workers, who may have various certificates or employees who have been trained in a given function etc. It goes without saying that being able to quickly estimate whether or not the necessary qualifications are represented in the rostering when required is an advantage.

"We have not implemented the qualification module yet, but it is one of the functionalities that I am looking forward to make use of, "Preben Schmidt says. "We dispose of seven different machines for confectioning in my department. All of the 34 employees have to be able to operate the basic machines, but we also have three machines that require additional qualifications hence the system would ease the scheduling in this respect."

Implementation user group

Rockwool A/S uses SAP as their accounting system from which the production plan is generated, but the company has chosen rostering from Mark Information.

"Among other things, this choice is made on the basis of price considerations, but the outstanding design of the user interface in ProManagement plays a significant part as well," Preben Schmidt says, who together with a colleague from the office team has been a representative from the factory in Vamdrup in the user group that participated in the implementation of the system.

"The user group, which consisted of a supervisor and a representative from the office team from each of Rockwool's Danish companies, has been trained in the system at Mark's premises in Lyngby. After this, we have been responsible for the training of our colleagues. In Vamdrup we have thus trained 15 supervisors in the planning and the approval modules of the system."

Unambiguous user interface

"At the beginning, I was a bit sceptical towards the system and the fact that we were in control of the functionalities ourselves," Preben Schmidt admits. "But when I set out working with the system, its user friendliness surprised me."

"I hardly spend any time on the system; on the contrary, I save time in some areas. For example, it is much easier in the morning when 15-16 employees clock in at the same time, because they change from "red men" to "green men" on my screen when they clock in. Previously, I had to walk around in the department to get this kind of overview."

The system also makes it possible to enter messages, for example to employees on the night shift, that pop up, when they clock in. And it takes less than one seminar day to learn.