- Success Story
Increase efficiency in finance through automation
Success Story Syntegon
How packaging specialist Syntegon Technology succeeded in making its finance processes significantly more efficient
Secure and sustainable packaging is a decisive success factor – particularly for manufacturers of sensitive products for the pharmaceutical and foods industry. Syntegon Technology delivers precisely tailored solutions for this – from individual machines to complete packaging lines, digital services and integrated solutions.
The portfolio of Syntegon Technology covers all relevant packaging processes. Whether it is filling and sealing, coding and sterilizing, weighing or thermoforming – the company from Waiblingen in Baden-Württemberg develops high quality, efficient solutions with its 6,000 employees at over 30 sites in 15 countries.
The goal: Greater efficiency in the finance field
The takeover by investor CVC Capital Partners at the beginning of 2020 marked a new chapter in the company history of Syntegon Technology. Once a business unit of a large group, the company now acts autonomously on the market. In the course of this, Syntegon Technology and CVC Capital Partners sought solutions to become more customer-centric and more efficient at the same time.
This involved the initiation of the Value Creation Program (VCP) across the company. With an eye to the global finance processes of Syntegon Technology, the aim is to maximize value added in the three continuously interlinked dimensions of organization, technology and employees – via intelligent automation solutions in particular. This necessitates the pursuing of a measurable business case and scalable approaches throughout the company. For this purpose, MHP was added as an external partner, to provide a one-stop solution for services from concept development to realization.
Capable process assessment – powered by MHP
We began by conducting a strategic analysis of central end-to-end processes in the finance field. This involved the use of our MHP Automation Assessment Tool (AAT) – a purely digital assessment that allowed the top-down breakdown of the existing process landscape of Syntegon Technology. In this way, together with the project team we could analyze more than 30 sub-processes across four sites.
In just a few hours, the structured AAT overview enables the efficiency potential of the finance operations of Syntegon Technology to be evaluated, steps to be prioritized and potential solutions and automation to be discussed. The sector comparison integrated into our AAT as standard also meant that it was possible to assess process costs and automation potential objectively, as our analysis has access to several hundred benchmarks and reference projects.
On the basis of this analysis and assessment activity we drew up an implementation plan, which is set to be realized in three waves up to 2022. This provides a detailed illustration of the automation solutions for all Syntegon Technology sites to be taken into consideration, as well as the business case.
We are now supporting the customer-specific integration of the selected automation applications with various SAP standards – especially along the process fields of order-to-cash and invoice-to-pay.
Challenges of the project
Several challenges needed to be overcome during the course of the project. In particular, the global scaling and implementation of the new solutions required efficient and clearly-structured project management from the project team – and under difficult conditions. Because the international coronavirus pandemic limited in-person collaboration over an extended period. However, the switch to remote teamwork went off smoothly.
After the roll-out of the pilot for the German-speaking area the project began to pick up speed, with the international subsidiaries integrated into the new solutions.
Our comprehensive change management, the consistent involvement of the increasing number of stakeholders and detailed business case tracking and project management meant that we succeeded in successfully mastering the diverse challenges. Our sequential approach from location to location allowed the project team to include regular feedback and reviews for optimization of the project approach.
Clear and measurable gains in efficiency
Expressed in figures, after the first evaluation the improved process throughput times resulted in gains in efficiency of considerably over 50 percent for multiple sub-processes. In this, it is already evident that our integrated project approach from analysis to implementation has established a solid basis for the worldwide scaling of the solution approaches. Whilst the targeted global standard has a direct effect on the efficiency goals, the taking into consideration of local peculiarities serves to ensure customer proximity in operational practice.
We are delighted to be supporting Syntegon Technology management as a holistically-thinking sparring partner with our process, automation and IT expertise in this cross-organizational transformation project. Highly in keeping with our purpose: Enabling You To Shape A Better Tomorrow.
“With our Value Creation Program, we are pursuing the goal of identifying significant potential for efficiency across the company and realizing this successively over a two-year period. MHP is supporting the project from the beginning onwards, with the automation and reorganization of the finance operations in particular making a key contribution to success.”
Stefan Schmidt
Director Finance Transformation Syntegon Technology GmbH
