How global manufacturer GMM Pfaudler boosts efficiency with Infor Value+ solutions

As a global leader in corrosion-resistant equipment, GMM Pfaudler plays a vital role in industries like pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, and food and beverages. From the medications you take to the food you consume, there’s a good chance that a Pfaudler tank has been part of the process.

After moving its Infor ERP to the cloud, Pfaudler is taking advantage of Infor Value+ solutions to streamline processes across purchasing, sales, finance, and supply chain planning. Infor Value+ is a catalog of prebuilt Infor ERP solution add-ons that are quick to deploy and utilize a select combination of artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI), robotic process automation (RPA), and other advanced technologies.

In addition to Infor Value+ solutions, Pfaudler is leveraging advanced tools such as Infor GenAI to accelerate its item master data quality project. This will lead to lower inventory costs, optimized pricing, and faster quote generation for the company.

“Moving our ERP to the cloud with Infor CloudSuite has been a game changer, allowing us to leverage the most advanced technologies and industry solutions developed by Infor. We recently implemented several Infor Value+ solutions, and in a short time, we have improved efficiency and equipped users with AI-powered tools to make better business decisions. As we continue to refine our strategies and explore new ways to leverage technology, we’re confident that Infor will help us stay ahead in an increasingly competitive market,” says Elisabetta Venezia, Group Director, ERP System & Data Management.

Improving sales effectiveness and margin optimization

Pfaudler struggled to analyze customer profitability due to fragmented data across multiple global locations, making reporting and decision-making complex and time-consuming. Key challenges included:

• Difficulty aggregating profitability data across locations and currencies
• Inaccurate cost data impacting pricing and decision-making
• Inefficient sales processes, with time wasted on less profitable customers
• Suboptimal pricing strategies due to a lack of clear profitability insights

To address these challenges, Pfaudler implemented Infor Value+ Customer Profitability Insights, an AI-powered dashboard that provides the sales team with a more accurate and efficient solution. In just a few hours, a prebuilt dashboard is delivered to the sales team, offering real-time insights into customer profitability to:

• Focus efforts on high-profit customers
• Develop strategies to improve less profitable customer accounts
• Optimize pricing and cost-saving strategies
• Reduce sales preparation time from up to three hours to under one hour

The solution aggregates data from all customer locations, providing a clear, real-time view of profitability across regions and currencies. This results in increased sales productivity, better decision-making, and improved sales margins:

• 5–10% increase in sales margins
• 83% reduction in employee time spent on sales meeting preparation
• 56 hours of IT resources saved annually

Driving on-time delivery and quality

Delivering high-quality, corrosion-resistant tanks on time is mission-critical for Pfaudler, especially for customers in the pharmaceutical industry. These tanks are essential for producing life-saving medical products, and any delays can result in significant penalties—up to 5% of the tank's value, which ranges from €30,000 to €600,000. Beyond financial costs, late deliveries impact customer trust, operational efficiency, and future orders.

With compact factory spaces producing these large and bulky tanks, maintaining an efficient workflow was a constant challenge. Additionally, Pfaudler operates a project-specific production process rather than serialized manufacturing, requiring timely and coordinated deliveries from vendors for seamless assembly. Any vendor delays can halt production, leading to costly disruptions and dissatisfied customers.

Evaluating vendor performance was a manual, labor-intensive process, making it difficult to quickly identify reliable vendors who consistently met Pfaudler’s standards. Key issues included:

• Difficulty calculating performance scores that factored in both timeliness and quality
• Time-consuming data collection and analysis, making it challenging to make data-driven decisions and identify reliable suppliers

To address these challenges, Pfaudler implemented Infor Value+ Vendor Performance Insights, a prebuilt vendor performance dashboard powered by AI. The solution automatically generates accurate vendor performance scores for both on-time delivery and product quality. This enables the purchasing team to:

• Quickly identify the right vendors for each project based on quality and timeliness standards
• Improve relationships with vendors through more accurate reporting, allowing them to identify root causes and take corrective action

By leveraging Vendor Performance Insights, Pfaudler has transformed its supplier management process. The tool not only reduces manual effort but also ensures that suppliers consistently meet expectations. This minimizes the risk of late deliveries, maintains customer trust, and streamlines production processes, ultimately increasing the company’s manufacturing efficiency and throughput:

• 5% penalty cost avoidance (up to €30,000 per tank)
• 99% reduction in employee time spent on vendor selection
• Implementation in less than seven days

Exclusion compliance made easy and effective

Ensuring compliance with import and export regulations is a non-negotiable priority for businesses operating on a global scale. For companies like Pfaudler, avoiding shipments to and from blacklisted countries is critical to maintaining legal and ethical operations.

However, the challenge lies in conducting continuous, accurate analyses for every open customer and purchase order—especially when projects span six to ten months. Key issues included:

• Compliance checks are performed when orders are created and shipped, taking approximately five minutes per order for over 200 orders processed daily.
• The goal is to check more than 3,000 open orders daily, but it would consume hundreds of hours and still leave room for human error.
• While custom compliance solutions were available, they came with steep price tags, making them impractical for long-term implementation

Pfaudler turned to Infor to find a solution for this complex issue. The Infor Value+ catalog of solutions offers Enterprise Automations Vendor Compliance Checks, which combines Infor AI and other technologies to automate exclusion list compliance checks.

Information from sanctioned lists (e.g., governmental parties, Office of Inspector General, European Union (EU) Financial Sanctions) is fed into the Infor Data Lake, where it’s combined with data on all open customer and purchase orders. Infor AI continuously cross-references open orders against the latest exclusion list information. This process generates a dashboard that flags any instances of non-compliance for immediate action.

Key benefits include:

• 17 hours saved per day on manual checks
• 100% ERP compliance with real-time, accurate exclusion list verification
• Implementation in less than 30 days

Venezia adds, “Thanks to Vendor Compliance Check, our verification process has transformed from a labor-intensive challenge into an effortless, reliable system. We no longer worry about missing critical blacklist updates or spending hours on manual checks. Instead, we can focus on delivering quality projects with confidence, knowing we are fully compliant with import and export regulations.”

Improving the speed and accuracy item master data quality project

Pfaudler recently embarked on a transformative project to clean and organize its vast inventory of 800,000 items. Many items had inconsistent or inadequate descriptions, making them difficult to search, categorize, and analyze. Additionally, thousands of items had different names or descriptions in multiple languages, leading to duplicate records. These data quality issues hindered supply chain processes, inflated inventory costs, and caused errors in production and customer quotations.

The first phase of the item master data quality project kicked off with two people manually remediating each item. Key challenges:

• It took five minutes to remediate one item—assign a new item group number, apply multilingual naming conventions, standardize and fill in gaps, and remove duplicates
• The repetitive, complex, and time-consuming tasks led to employee stress and burnout

Completing the project manually would have taken seven years, making it an impractical solution for data management. Recognizing the inefficiency of manual methods, Pfaudler turned to Infor to leverage generative AI capabilities embedded within its CloudSuite ERP.

Key breakthroughs with Infor GenAI include:

• Clustering: Poorly described items were analyzed and grouped by similarity for faster remediation
• Multilingual text authoring widget: Simplified the generation of consistent and accurate item names across multiple languages

With Infor GenAI, Pfaudler has accelerated the item master data quality project and expects to complete the project within six months. With improved data quality, Pfaudler envisions a future with clearer descriptions and harmonized naming, supporting seamless operations across supply chain, procurement, sales, and engineering. The expected results are:

• 95% faster data remediation
• 7-year reduction in project completion time
• 5% decrease in overall inventory costs through better inventory rotation and reduced safety stock levels, translating to €1–2 million in savings.

Generative AI has also alleviated the burden of repetitive tasks, making work more engaging for employees. This technological shift fostered innovation within the organization, with teams brainstorming new applications for generative AI across departments.

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