L-mobile in Operation at Helima

The Challenge

Spacers are essential for the production of modern multi-layer insulation glass. They ensure the necessary distance between the individual glass panes and are made from aluminium strips. The material is supplied by the aluminium mill industry in large 500 mm-wide reels called coils, cut into strips on a fully automated longitudinal cutting line and then cold-formed into closed profiles on a profiling line. For end-to-end tracking, Helima has to document every processing step precisely. This is also increasingly becoming mandatory due to ever stricter testing requirements in customer specifications. “Before using L-mobile, our employees wrote down all the important data by hand and entered it into the ERP system subsequently,” explains Reinhold Wenzel. “This process was prone to writing mistakes, incorrect assignments and data entry errors.”

Helima is a world leader in the development and manufacture of high-frequency-welded aluminium tubes for the insulation glass and window industry. Founded in 1949 and based in Wuppertal, the company manufactures radiator tubes for heat exchangers as well as spacers and muntin systems for windows. Helima uses state-of-the-art manufacturing techniques. All the key parts of the company’s machinery are in-house developments.

Die Lösung

L-mobile Production has finally made error-prone manual systems a thing of the past at Helima. The solution controls the whole production process from goods receipt, storage and production to order picking and dispatch. Employees are connected to the central ERP system at all times via a PDA. They receive all the necessary information on upcoming production orders and report production-relevant data such as manufacturing processes or item quantities back to the ERP system. Machines, manufacturing processes and goods are identified quickly and without errors using barcode scanners. The required labels and documents are automatically generated by L-mobile.

Unfilled orders

In the warehouse too, L-mobile provides valuable support and ensures that Helima has a precise overview of current stocks at all times. The solution also precisely monitors order picking and goods dispatch. This guarantees that the only products which end up in the lorry are those listed on the delivery note – with no possibility of error.

Success

“Every year, we deliver 200 million metres of aluminium profiles to the glass and window industry all over the world. Thanks to L-mobile, we can pinpoint which batch of material each outgoing packaging container was manufactured from.”
Reinhold Wenzel
Managing Director of Helima

By introducing the mobile solution, Helima has succeeded in making the whole production process transparent and guaranteeing seamless batch tracking of raw material right through to the finished product. “Scanning the barcode labels is much more efficient and reliable than writing by hand, as we used to do,” explains Reinhold Wenzel. “Our employees are guided through each individual process step by L-mobile. Thanks to the close connection with the ERP system, all incoming data is immediately verified online. This has enabled us to reduce our error rate to zero and massively improve both stock reliability and adherence to delivery deadlines,” says the Managing Director, who is delighted with the new system.

Reinhold Wenzel also rates the well-founded industry know-how of L-mobile very highly. “L-mobile is very knowledgeable when it comes to the industry-specific workflows of the metal processing sector,” he explains. “The team familiarised itself very quickly with our actual processes and created a solution that perfectly reflects our needs.”

Technical Information