Punched, bent, finished—and digitalized!

Anyone who has ever stood in a hardware store looking at the shelves of brackets, fittings, and hinges has almost certainly come across August Vormann. But no, Vormann doesn’t work there. August Vormann GmbH & Co. KG from Ennepetal in Germany’s southern Ruhr area is an internationally successful press-bend, design, toolmaking, and sales specialist. With MAIT's help, the company has taken a huge step towards digitalization since 2002—and is rigorously pursuing this successful strategy going forward.

Sector Metalworking and metal processing

Region Ruhr area, western Germany

Company size 190 employees

For over 150 years and five generations, Vormann has been committed to quality "Made in Germany". Decades of experience are reflected in the constantly growing range of high-grade connectors, brackets and shelf supports, an assortment of hooks, chains, ropes, and a handrail and banister system. Vormann products convince both aspiring do-it-yourselfers in hardware stores and professional tradespeople in specialty and wholesale stores. What makes Vormann so special? Vormann not only delivers the hardware to retailers itself, but also designs and sets up the presentation area on request, including monitoring stock levels and providing a replenishment service. In addition, with its own tool shop, the company also designs and manufactures custom-made products for industrial customers.

With its mix of domestically manufactured quality products and its innovative pan-European service, Vormann has long been asserting itself against international competitors. It's a successful strategy, but one that also poses a particular challenge: Vormann's value chain is long and complex. It extends from drawing a hinge to continuously managing thousands of shelves in hardware stores and at specialty retailers. And not to forget: Vormann has a huge variety of products—and manufacturing them is a task that calls for the utmost precision. The company employs 190 people at three locations in Germany, plus a sales office in South Africa.

Abas ERP enables flexible and efficient corporate management

Come 2001 there was no getting round it: The way Vormann was set up in terms of systems meant that the company wouldn't be able to meet the growing international demand for much longer—let alone its own high standards. And so the management contacted the MAIT experts for enterprise resource planning (ERP) in Mettmann. Shortly afterwards, a four-strong MAIT team under the joint leadership of Jürgen Neidhardt and Robert Hehl installed a new company software. Its name: Abas ERP. The goal: to use a more efficient and state-of-the-art way of managing and controlling the company across all areas, including accounting, production, sales, and materials management. abas ERP thus replaced the company’s own software solution that had been running on the servers in Ennepetal for 20 years. This was urgently needed, because at some point updates and extensions could only be programmed with a great deal of effort—if at all. And operating the system was becoming increasingly complicated and time-consuming. With Abas ERP, these problems became a thing of the past: Once installed, the high-performance, robust software immediately impressed with its flexible architecture. The solution can be easily adapted and updated at any time by connecting additional databases, without the need for any extra programming. This means that abas is also upgrade-compatible in the long term and can easily keep pace with any future company development. For Vormann and indeed every other company, this means one thing above all else: security of investment.

"MAIT had raved about Abas ERP in the run-up to the project. But the result far exceeded our expectations. Thanks to the high degree of automation and the user-friendly operation in all our business processes, we have become more efficient, more flexible, and more transparent."

Managing Partner

August Vormann GmbH & Co. KG

Extra software for digitalization and automation

After successfully rolling out and putting the Abas ERP standard software into operation, MAIT began introducing further solutions one by one—swiftly and thoroughly as always. This enabled Vormann to further increase efficiency and transparency:

The Proxess document management system and the integration of abas DMS enable easy digital archiving of documents and quick retrieval when required.
Thanks to Seeburger's Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Vormann can accept orders from customers and issue delivery notes and invoices—fully electronically and without any manual intervention.
Depending on the target market, BEO customs software creates the necessary documents in electronic or printed form and carries out automatic sanctions screening.
The Jedox business intelligence software enables rapid evaluation of all corporate key figures stored in the Abas ERP system, thereby quickly creating a reliable basis for cross-departmental planning and budgeting.

En route to becoming a smart factory

The package of measures enabled Vormann to make huge strides in its digitalization in just a short space of time: More than 80% of communication with its customers is now electronic and largely automated. This reduces data input errors and speeds up processes considerably. It has also cut costs for personnel, warehousing, and materials.

Today, Vormann also trusts in MAIT's hardware: MAIT implemented the necessary server and network environment for all applications at the Vormann premises and maintains it to this day. Together with MAIT, Vormann is currently planning to move the entire IT and all software applications to the cloud—or more precisely, to the MAIT data center in Pforzheim. So as of 2021, Vormann will no longer need its own server solutions.

With this move, August Vormann is pressing ahead with its digitalization—resolutely and, as always, in collaboration with the IT and software professionals from MAIT.