Karton Spa chooses Mosaic as partner for Business Intelligence

The company

Forty years of experience has made Karton become a leading business in the manufacture of solid and corrugated polypropylene (PP) sheets.

This family business was set up some fifty years ago by two brothers, Matteo and Roberto Bressan. At first, Karton transformed carton packaging, hence the origin of the company’s name.

The first successful step was made in 1978 thanks to a pioneeristic idea, in fact Matteo – a man with a great vision and spirit of observation – had an intuition ahead of the times, when he encountered a new Japanese patent during a trade fair. A brand new technology, consisting in the extrusion of corrugated PP sheets made its first appearance in Europe.

All the interesting features of corrugated cardboard (light, easy to transform, protective…) combined with the superior mechanical properties of polypropylene (greater resistance to impacts, waterproof, recyclable).

The newly-born material proved to offer a wide range of advantages compared to corrugated carton. Cartonplast® (PP sheet) was adopted as re-usable packaging. The rest is history.Karton soon mastered the techniques of extruding corrugated and solid polypropylene sheets, becoming the indisputable leader in Italy and all over Europe in the production of re-usable packaging.

In the Eighties, our collaboration with a major multinational company of the beverage sector such as Heineken proved to be crucial, in fact a particularly successful product was developed, i.e. the re-usable PP layer pad. In the Eighties, Karton aimed with foresightedness at the internationalization of business, becoming well-established in European markets starting from the German speaking countries. We then focused on the development of other fields of business: food industry, electrical household appliances, automotive industry, agriculture and building, with an increase of  turnover and know-how encompassing a wide range of products.

Such developments have always gone hand in hand with our continuous commitment to meet our customers’ needs achieving a certified Management System in compliance with the standards ISO 9001, ISO 22000,  ISO 14001, OHSAS 18001 and LPS 1207.

Karton keeps on developing and firmly believes in a model of sustainable growth, both from an economic and environmental point of view. In our 2 production units located in Sacile and S. Giorgio di Nogaro, Karton is equipped with extremely modern PP recycling systems, where products at the end of their lives, such as PP layer pads or pallets, turn into new ones made from recycled materials. A virtuous circle, a ‘cradle to cradle’ approach that keeps us up to date with the ecologically sustainable vision of our time, and that has made us for 30 years the pioneers of Circular Economy thanks to our re-usable and long-life packaging solutions.

Now, as then, our strength lies in reliability, innovation and quality. Dynamism and flexibility  are the specific features that have been combined with an advanced and efficient manufacturing technology.

Why BOARD?

BOARD was adopted by Karton in 2014, initially to develop an integrated and shared commercial reporting environment.

The choice of BOARD was made after evaluating its strengths. To convince the management of Karton was in particular the great versatility, which integrates a complete Business Intelligence environment with powerful features of Corporate Performance Management.

After the first pilot reporting project, the development of BOARD in the company continued on integrated CPM applications, with the aim of supervising key processes such as Commercial Planning and administration of monthly management accounting closures.

The project

The implementation project in Karton was followed from the beginning in collaboration with the Mosaic team, a certified Board partner with a strong presence in the north-east of Italy.

From the very beginning, the Mosaic approach was modular, based on the priorities of  Karton. For each module developed, the methodology applied by Mosaic consultants was characterized by the following project phases:

• Analysis of the needs
• Sources analysis and AS IS situation
• Planning and sharing of the TO BE model
• Application development
• Testing, data checking
• Application Release, feedback collection from users
• Fine tuning and final validation
• Release and start-up of the application
• Training of users involved in the process

The development of the BOARD environment, started in 2013 with the first database for the analysis of sales and order, has continued over time in a constant manner, reaching the needs of most of the company functions.

BOARD today

BOARD is currently used in almost all the most important functional areas, both as a Business Intelligence system and as a Corporate Performance Management application.

The main Business Intelligence environments developed currently cover the following functional areas:

• Commercial (Sales / Orders / Marginality)
• Wharehouse (Storage levels / Handling)
• Production (Productivity / Efficiency / KPI)
• HR
• Finance (Balances / KPI / Cash Flow analysis)
• Supply Chain (Purchases / Purchase Orders)
• Dashboard (top management reporting)    

The main applications of CPM developed cover the needs of overseeing the following processes:

• Monthly Management Closures
• Commercial Planning
• Cost allocation model

Updates to reporting environments are performed on a daily basis through a nocturnal feeding procedure that has been made very efficient over time. The information supplied by the company ERP system is completed by users using the main features of the BOARD data entry.

Conclusions

BOARD is today a consolidated reality in Karton. The synergy created with the Mosaic consultants has made it possible to achieve important goals, first of all to automate numerous processes, obtaining a tangible added value for the company.

All company functions recognize in the BOARD platform a versatile and reliable tool for the analysis of both BI and CPM data and in Mosaic consultants a point of reference in the development and understanding of all the potentials of the system.

Thanks to the Mosaic method, sensible improvements have been achieved in different processes:

• effective analysis tools thanks to the wide possibility of personalization and profiling;
• standardization of data coming from different sources;
• uniformity of the data shared between the different sites;
• timely distribution of information.

Rapid changes in the business continually require new analyzes, as well as a periodic review of existing ones. Precisely for this reason Karton, a company always focused on innovation, has found in Mosaic a perfect partner as it is constantly improving and updating.

The added value achieved through the use of BOARD is clearly perceived by users, who interact more and more with system administrators right from the design and development phases of the applications.

The close collaboration with Mosaic has allowed an optimal development of the platform: each module has been designed based on the needs and indications received by Karton and all implementations are made starting from scratch taking into account the observations of users.

In conclusion, thanks to the contribution of the skills, tools and methodologies proposed by Mosaic, Karton has achieved, over the years, all the improvement objectives set and is preparing to further optimize its processes to continue to be an innovative, efficient reality. and a step forward to others.