Now the entire Billerud Group has entered an agreement covering access to the SSG Product Database. At the same time, the company has decided to implement SSG Supply Network (SSN), the electronic invoice administration service, throughout the corporate group.
Over the past year the Billerud Group has undergone substantial changes in the form of a reorganisation to achieve a clearer market and business area focus while at the same time a far-reaching programme dubbed Billerud 2007 is being conducted to cut costs.
The programme also included a review of the Group’s purchasing, stock-keeping and logistics and resulted in the signing of a new agreement for SSG Product Database and the electronic transaction service SSG Supply Network (SSN).
“This work has a high priority in our efforts to identify additional synergies and potential savings where supplies for the Group are concerned,” says Bo Österberg, purchasing manager at Billerud. He joined the company in November last year and was previously purchasing manager at Duni.
Earlier, Billerud’s three mills had different item numbering systems and different supplier records.
“Skärblacka and Karlsborg had their own item numbers while Gruvön, to some extent, made use of a number of SKC numbers as a complement,” says Bo Österberg.
Lower costs and simpler work
The object of the expanded collaboration with SSG is to create a uniform code for items for the three mills and the suppliers, as well as a common communication interface with all of Billerud’s suppliers.
“Our ambition is to obtain lower prices via net price contracts that apply throughout Billerud. We also need to be able to follow-up and measure activities as well as harness the synergies that exist in stocking spare parts. On the whole, we anticipate that this will cut our tied-up capital and reduce our purchasing costs. And, beginning next year, we will start to realize some of the expected effects,” says Bo Österberg.
Since its launch in March of this year the project, which is very comprehensive, has involved more than 20 people at Billerud.
“At the end of May we started training our own personnel and in August we started matching and implementing SKC numbers. By Christmas we count on having more than 20,000 SKC numbers. This figure represents the bulk of the items that have moved in recent years plus a number of items that have been relatively easy to identify since a number of our suppliers have been applying the SKC classification system,” says Bo Österberg.
Implementing SSN too
As a natural consequence of its collaboration concerning SSG Product Database Billerud has also decided to implement SSG’s electronic communication interface, SSN, which has been enhanced to also encompass invoice scanning.
“We wanted to review the entire flow with respect to our suppliers. In our view it is not part of our core activities to link suppliers to EDI and therefore we sought a partner who, at the lowest possible cost, could administer all electronic communication with our suppliers, from scanning to full EDI – regardless of the supplier’s interface,” says Bo Österberg before concluding:
“Purchasing is, to a considerable extent, a matter of consolidation. We have great expectations that our collaboration with SSG will help us be even more successful in our consolidation efforts.”