Birla Carbon is one of the largest manufacturers and suppliers of high-quality carbon black additives globally, and a flagship business of the US $65 billion Aditya Birla Group. For more than 160 years, Birla Carbon has been at the forefront of the carbon black industry, pushing innovation and development to ensure that practically any need in any place in the world can be met. The company’s footprint extends across 12 countries on 5 continents with 16 manufacturing facilities for a combined annual production capacity of over 2 million tons.
A Loftware customer since 2006, Birla Carbon used Loftware Print Server (LPS) as a global solution for all its printers and labels. As part of its cloud-first strategy, Birla Carbon modernized its labeling solution by migrating from LPS to Loftware Cloud. Birla Carbon also maintains dynamic data for approximately 40 different inventory and shipping labels in SAP.
At Birla Carbon, labeling is a business-critical function. If they can’t print labels, they can’t ship their products. So, it was important that the migration go as smoothly as possible, with minimal disruption to daily business operations. When it came time to migrate, Loftware provided the necessary tools and technical support to facilitate and quickly streamline platform migration. Once that process was complete, the company had a clear picture of everything that was in the system and what was extracted. Once all the templates were in place in Loftware Cloud, that step also helped reveal dozens of legacy labels that were no longer in use. Thanks to the migration, Birla Carbon was able to reduce the number of label templates in the system from 100 down to 40.
During our migration to Loftware Cloud we identified several stale templates which enabled us to reduce label templates by 60%.
Matilde Quaglia
Coordonnatrice informatique régionale EMEA, Birla Carbon
In LPS, Birla Carbon used a file-drop process to transfer labels from SAP to the label printing system. When the company migrated to Loftware Cloud, it was able to easily update the process it already used in LPS by using the Universal Connector. The IT team handled label testing, just to make sure the process worked properly, and they were able to move seamlessly from one system to the next, without disrupting label printing.
Birla Carbon used Loftware’s Online Academy to train all its geographically dispersed team members so they could use the new system as quickly as possible. According to Matilde Quaglia, Regional IT Coordinator EMEA at Birla Carbon, using the online training system made it possible to train employees in every time zone easily and efficiently. “We decided that the Academy was the best solution because everyone could start the training at their own pace and when they had sufficient time to do so,” she says
Another benefit of moving labeling to the Cloud is the ability to extend labeling system access to a wider group of employees and significantly reduce IT burden. Streamlining operations, IT helped minimize the risk of system failure and production downtime by empowering business users to troubleshoot printing issues locally. Prior to the migration, only two employees could access and maintain the labeling system. Now, using Loftware Cloud’s web-based access and role-based access control, Birla Carbon has extended system access to regional coordinators in its various manufacturing sites across their enterprise. Coordinators can check printer and queue status, conduct basic troubleshooting, and even fix printer issues themselves, which keeps production running across multiple time zones.
