Aarbakke Machinery prepares for Industry 4.0
Aarbakke is a company that probably doesn’t need an introduction for most. They’re one of the world’s leading machining companies, tirelessly working to be the very best at what they do. With a story dating back to 1918, they have decades of experience under their belt. These days, they’re counting over 300 employees and a turnover of 1 billion NOK. To handle their growth and growing complexity they needed a new business system, and we had the perfect fit.
Choosing a new business system
With great growth, comes great challenges. The company grows with more people, production levels go up, and internal systems turn more complex. There simply becomes a lot more to keep track of.
For Aarbakke, different departments such as sales and finance were working manually on their separate ends - in separate systems. It came to the point where they saw a need to change their ERP system for better data quality, more flexibility, control, growth, and last but not least: scalability. The Solution? Implementing RamBase Cloud-based ERP together with Mazeppa Group.
“Until now, our ERP system has only covered plan, project, and production, so it’s been important for me to anchor RamBase towards sales, logistics, and finance, and ensuring that there are responsible people in every corner. The way things are today, we spend 10 days getting an overview of the monthly result, whereas I should’ve had it one minute after midnight at the end of every month.”
- Inge Brigt Aarbakke, CEO of Aarbakke.
Trusting the process
As an implementation partner, our goal is to bring solid industry competence, skills, and experience into making this partnership a success. When we feel like we have the right system to provide a customer, that’s a great start. However, that’s when the real work begins.
Together with Aarbakke, we went through one of the most challenging, yet rewarding implementation processes. It was time-consuming and challenging on both sides of the table. When it comes to ERP, there’s no one size fits all. What you get out of the process comes down to what system you are implementing, and the people you work with.
Aage Ramstad, CEO of Mazeppa Group adds;
“By being met by a great team at Aarbakke, we got off to a very good start. This is an incredibly exciting customer, and we are proud to have them on board! This underlines exactly where we want to be with RamBase.”
Technology and a better way of working
Aarbakke is one of the world's leading companies in CNC machining for the oil industry, and in recent years the company has gone from 10 to 50% export trade. One of their secrets is having a fully digitized production, and continuously utilizing algorithms for more efficient production.
- "We are a highly digitalized company, and we have called the initiative The learning factory, which is basically industry 4.0 in a Norwegian context. The purpose here is to connect everything; all machines, all assets, all systems, all data, into one platform. The data-driven learning cycle can best be summarized in this way: Collect-Learn-Improve-Repeat " says Rolf.
The Smart Factory platform is called CDF, or Cognite Data Fusion platform, and the reward of this interconnection of data and information is a continuous improvement of the company's efficiency and earnings. Furthermore, the purpose of connecting everything lies at the very core of Aarbakke's foundation: A driving force toward always improving through continuously learning from their own behaviors.
The road ahead
In the process of switching to RamBase, Aarbakke has included the entire organization and found the company’s cutting-edge expertise to look into how RamBase could optimize operations and processes for its respective department. This way, each department has its own leader who knows and understands the core system, so that they’ll be able to experiment and expand the system in the future.
“I know it will be a challenge to go through the process of changing systems for the employees, but knowing what functionality and possibilities lie in RamBase, I know it will be worth it, and now all 300 Aarbakke employees are standing ready for launch,” says Inge Brigt.
Team Mazeppa looks forward to cheering on Aarbakke going forward, and we’re there to assist at any time.
