Baden-Jensen and FORCE Technology continue collaboration

Baden-Jensen is a leading car and industrial paint, workshop equipment, and software solutions distributor. Established in 1944, the company is still family-owned and run by the third generation. The company is known for its deep expertise in specialised paint and equipment and offers insights and tailored solutions to car body shops.

Ambition to remove paper trail requires digital technologies

The reason for Baden-Jensen to join the Digital Factory Acceleration (DFA) programme was to enhance its warehouse logistics and embrace modern technologies to improve efficiency, transparency and the overall customer experience. To meet the aim, it became clear that the current paper trail in the warehouse and mixing department should be replaced with a digital workflow to enhance higher efficiency, transparency and product traceability.

Opportunities for reducing waste and improving capacity identified

The first phase of the DFA programme (i.e. the mapping and analysis performed using FORCE Technology's "Digital Factory Mapping") has shown different opportunities to improve the warehouse's capacity and mixing operations and reduce waste.

Focusing on the potential reduction of waste material was instrumental since waste often involves high-value special paints. Furthermore, it is an important factor in Baden-Jensen's work to lower the company's environmental footprint.

The main opportunities for increasing the capacity of the current production systems concerned:

• Utilisation of tablets to show needed information to the operators, e.g. the picking list, the product location, and inventory status, and of scanners (QR/barcode) to automate the registration of performed activities (e.g. products picked from the inventory, delivery of orders, the opening of paint cans, etc.). This would reduce errors and enhance traceability.
• Using software-based routing to optimise the picking route based on set parameters such as weight, size and fragility, reducing the dependency on personal experience when picking items from the warehouse.
• Integrating the ERP, the mixing software and the scale used for the mixing operations to facilitate automatic adjustment of the recipe of the specific paint based on the graduate mixing process, preventing waste, for instance, when too much of one ingredient is added and reducing the time spent for information retrieving and registration.
• Integrating different software to remove systematic copy-paste operations during the delivery activities and ensuring updated information in the ERP system to streamline operations and remove repetitive and non-value-adding work.

Collaboration on identified digital solutions moves forward

Martin Baden-Jensen, CEO, says: "It has been a great project, where we experienced an in-depth action and analysis leading to something tangible: we can see some well-documented benefits for all the solution proposals proposed by FORCE Technology."

The company has already started to work on the integration of ERP, mixing software and scale to enhance the performance of the mixing operations, as well as of the different software used during the delivery activities to improve their efficiency.

Moreover, the partnership between Baden-Jensen and FORCE Technology is progressing, leveraging the DFA programme and the co-financing by Industriens Fond. 

The aim for the upcoming collaboration activity is for FORCE Technology to support the company in the identification and adoption of a paperless production solution (including QR/barcode scanners and tablets) aligned with the company's production requirements, interconnected with the current company's IT systems and ready to be integrated with its future ERP system. 
Introducing a paperless production solution will address a 7%+ capacity increase potential and significant waste reduction opportunities, thanks to the enabled transparency.