ERCO GmbH—The Light Factory. Architectural Lighting.
⁴PEP Product Structure and Variant Management at ERCO
ERCO Light Factory is a leading specialist in architectural lighting with LED technology. The family-owned business operates globally with independent sales organizations and partners. ERCO is the first established luminaire manufacturer with a product range based entirely on LED technology. Consequently, ERCO develops, designs, and produces digital luminaires with a focus on photometric optics, electronics, and design. The high-quality, tailor-made lighting solutions add a new design dimension to buildings, offices or outdoor facilities. In order to master their product variance and complexity, which has risen due to their strong customer orientation, ERCO relies on the process support of ⁴PEP Product Structure and Variant Management.
Customer Quote
“With the innovation of LED, our number of variants has sky-rocketed. Thanks to ⁴PEP , the same team can handle up to 40 times more product variations! ⁴PEP is our core for the entire product life cycle.“
Andreas Schütz, Research & Development, Team Leader Project Management Office
Company
- name: ERCO GmbH
- locations: Lüdenscheid and in 55 countries worldwide
- industry: Architectural lighting
- products: LED luminaires
- revenue: 140 million EUR (2017)
- employees: 1,000 (2018)
- Website: https://www.erco.com/en/
Initial situation and challenge
- drastic rise in the number of variants due to an increase in the variance of existing products and the development of new product families
- significant increase of product variants could not be mapped efficiently in the existing SAP system without adding resources
- adaptation of processes and IT systems was necessary
Highlights
- mapping of product variance (rules of combinatorics etc.) using matrices without any programming or expert knowledge
- substitution of the product information of the complex item number by using product characteristics
- integration and simple transfer of the set of rules into SAP LO-VC
Customer benefits
- adding resources not necessary despite the increase in product variants
- expansion of the group of users thanks to the high degree of usability of ⁴PEP
- considerable reduction of throughput times for changes in regards to product launches
- maintenance of descriptive item numbers not required anymore
