Appvantage! Advantage for manufacturing

A Hauni production area filled with machines and people actively working on manufacturing tasks. — Global rollout of Appvantage in all Hauni Group production halls.

‎Global rollout of Appvantage

Since October, Appvantage has been available to around 30 sales employees at Hauni in Hamburg. “The new solution offers them direct access to all relevant order data on one interface – including interactive order overviews, status information and shipping requests,” explains Magdalena Gade, Program Manager Smart Factory at Hauni. “The fact that we were able to provide this solution within three weeks is due to the intensive preparatory work we have done over the past two years.”

A group of Hauni employees focused on a computer screen displaying Appvantage software. — Appvantage allows employees to discuss urgent questions interactively and spontaneously without leaving the machine.

From 2018 until now

The Appvantage success story began in 2018 when the Hauni Group launched its multinational OneUI project, which aimed to develop a common system for providing information in manufacturing and assembly. In 2019, OneUI was continued as part of Hauni‘s Smart Factory digitalization cluster. This expanded Appvantage into a complete solution, delivering all relevant information directly to the workplace in a digital format and thus increasing productivity.

Paperless, fast and up-to-date

“The documents that our colleagues in manufacturing and assembly need for their work used to be distributed across many different digital and physical filing systems. Appvantage provides quick access to the most up-to-date data at any time via an intuitive digital interface, reducing search times to a minimum,” explains Fisnik Kelmendi, Project Manager Appvantage. “It works much like a smartphone app – our colleagues call up the manufacturing or assembly launchpad they want using their Internet browser and access all the relevant information via the interactive website.”

In manufacturing, Appvantage covers topics such as tooling plans, work instructions and production order overviews. For assembly workers, topics include 3D models, parts lists and missing parts overviews.

Extremely popular in the plants

At the German sites in Bergedorf and Schwarzenbek, Richmond in the USA, Pécs in Hungary and Shah Alam in Malaysia, more than 800 employees in production and assembly are already using Appvantage every day. The solution has been well received. “We often used to have problems with time-consuming information searches and outdated documents. This led to delays and downtime in assembly. Today, we can access everything we need at the click of a mouse.

This allows us to concentrate fully on our actual work, significantly reduces processing times and improves quality,” says Andreas Vogt, a mechanic in Rebuild Assembly at Hauni subsidiary Universelle.

The positive reception is encouraging the Appvantage team to take the system to the next level. “The solutions available so far for assembly, manufacturing and sales are only the beginning. The future will be digitally supported!”, explains Andres Panz, CTO at Hauni. “This will make key information available directly and enable operators to control tasks and processes without downtime. Paperless workflows also pay off in terms of sustainability. In the next few months, we will therefore be adding further features to Appvantage in order to tap into further potential for improvement, to simplify our own processes and to be able to serve our customers even faster.”

“Appvantage makes processes transparent. This allows them to be specifically analyzed and improved.”
Magdalena Gade
Program Manager Smart Factory at Hauni Group