OPAL Labelmanagement™ with SAP® Integration & SAP® EH&S at Mäder Plastilack AG
Reliable labelling in connection with SAP® EH&S
The Mäder Group installed a new companywide SAP®-integrated labelling system. This is currently in use in Switzerland, Germany and France. SAP® LABELMANAGEMENT by OPAL in combination with already existing industrial printers round off the product and logistics processes.
As a leading producer of industrial coatings, decoration colours and composite materials, it is imperative to ensure the reliable labelling of the produced materials. An experienced partner is necessary to fulfil all of the layout requirements and labelling incl. instructions.
This partner should have experience in the field of printer connection and configuration as well as in layout design. Another very important field of experience is the connection to and printing from SAP®. The task here is to prepare the centralised management of labels, printers and print data. As if that were not enough, there is also the requirement in this quite critical process of collecting all of the relevant EH&S information for the relevant materials per print task. There must be access to the data from the SAP® EH&S module for this purpose.
A solution was found after intensive research: The new and more effective system is based on the SAP® -integrated LABELMANAGEMENT, which can access the SAP® EH&S model. This was developed by the AutoID system integrator OPAL and works with the label software BarTender® by Seagull Scientific.
The labels are printed quickly and error-free on almost all of the label printers available on the market.
In 2015, the OPAL LABELMANAGEMENT™ system was installed in the Mäder companies in Switzerland (Killwangen), then in Germany (Strullendorf, Gelsenkirchen) together with France. After some of the decisions in favour of the continued rollout were taken at short notice, the challenge for the partner, OPAL, was not only in connecting the SAP® module, EH&S, but also in the simultaneous implementation at several sites within 6 weeks. Good cooperation between the partners resulted in full implementation by the planned go-live date.
Problem: Several countries, one SAP® system, separate processes
A system that can manage several print processes separately is required in order to be able to connect several sites to a central SAP® system, keep all of the print processes separate and to be able to print very large amounts of data from SAP® EH&S including pictograms.
The installed OPAL LABELMANAGEMENT™ enables you to manage a separate print server at each site and keep the processes separate in SAP®. This is relevant not only for the print job, but for the entire class developed in ABAP that is responsible for data gathering and print preparation. With this solution, potential malfunctions can be limited to individual sites by correcting the layout or enhancing the print classes. The effects of an adjustment by one site can thus be kept to a minimum despite having a central SAP® system.
Connecting the SAP® EH&S module
The specification of the labels to be printed was not easy. The main challenge was to correctly read the enormous amount of information from the SAP® EH&S module per material and to combine this in several languages on a label.
OPAL provides a standardised EH&S master class for their LABELMANAGEMENT in order to implement this. It can read all of the SAP® EH&S-relevant material for a material among other things.
The configuration is child’s play in relation to the effort. All of the relevant information can be set up by maintaining a configuration table prepared by OPAL. This information is then invoked in a label class, which also guarantees user-friendly operation with LABELMANAGMENT specific functions. After a relatively low amount of effort, the first print job with SAP® EH&S data could be executed.
