Elisabetta Venezia

Group Director, ERP System & Data Management, GMM Pfaudler

GMM Pfaudler delivers corrosion-resistant technologies, systems and services worldwide and remains the preferred choice by consistently providing its customers in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries with innovative and cost-effective solutions. 

GMM Pfaudler has 19 manufacturing locations with an extensive sales and service network and employs more than 2000 people across 4 continents. 

Supernova Award Category: 
Future of Work: Employee Experience
The Problem: 

Pfaudler embarked on a transformative project to clean and organize an inventory of 800,000 items. Many items had inconsistent or inadequate descriptions, making it difficult to search, categorize, and analyze. Thousands of items had different names or descriptions in multiple languages, leading to duplicate records. These data quality issues inflated inventory costs and caused errors in production and customer quotations.  We kicked off an item master data quality project with two people spending approximately 5 minutes manually remediating each item—assign a new item group code, apply multilingual naming conventions, standardize and fill in gaps, and remove duplicates.  This time-consuming task would take 7 years to complete and was creating employee stress and burnout. 

Recognizing the inefficiency this item master data quality project, we turned to Infor to help us streamline after having recent success with Infor Value+ solutions to automate manual processes across Purchasing, Sales, Finance, and Supply Chain Planning.  These manual processes were: 

  • Analyzing customer profitability with data fragmented across multiple global locations was complex and time-consuming.  
  • Analyzing vendor performance was labor intensive, making it difficult to quickly identify reliable vendors who consistently met Pfaudler’s standards. 
  •  Vendor compliance checks for 3000+ open customer and purchase orders to meet changing import/export regulations could not be manually completed daily.
The Solution: 

Moving our ERP to Infor CloudSuite opened access to the most advanced technologies and solutions developed by Infor that were pre-integrated, industry specific, and quick to deploy. In 2024, we were early adopters of Infor GenAI to speed up the item master data quality project after having success with Infor Value+ solutions to automate manual processes:

  • Infor Value+ Customer Profitability Insights, an AI powered dashboard to provide Sales real-time insights into customer profitability 
  • Infor Value+ Vendor Performance Insights, an AI powered vendor performance scores based on on-time delivery and product quality
  • Infor Value+ Vendor Compliance Checks, AI combined with RPA delivers a dashboard that flags any instances of non-compliance
  • Infor GenAI Clustering: Poorly described items were analyzed and grouped by similarity for faster remediation
  • Infor GenAI Multilingual text authoring widget:Simplified the generation of consistent and accurate item names across multiple languages 
The Results: 

In a very short amount of time, Pfaudler has gained more efficiency and equipped users with AI powered tools to make better business decisions to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive market. Infor Value+ solutions and Infor GenAI has alleviated the burden of repetitive tasks, making work more engaging for employees.  

Sales teams leverage Infor Value+ Customer Profitability Insights to: 

  • Focus efforts on high-profit customers 
  • Develop strategies to improve less profitable customer accounts 
  • Optimize pricing and cost-saving strategies 
  • Reduce sales meeting preparation time from three hours to under one hour 

Purchasing team leverages Infor Value+ Vendor Performance Insights to: 

  • Quickly identify the right vendors for each project based on quality and timeliness standards 
  • Improve relationships with vendors through more accurate reporting, allowing them to identify root causes and take corrective action 

Compliance teams leverage Infor Value+ Vendor Compliance Checks to: 

  • Quickly identify and take immediate action on entities that need to be excluded or blocked 
  • Have peace of mind that open orders are automatically checked daily   

Infor GenAI has accelerated the item master data quality project with clearer descriptions and harmonized naming, supporting seamless operations across supply chain, procurement, sales, and engineering teams: 

Metrics: 

Infor Value+ Customer Profitability Insights aggregates data from all customer locations, providing a real-time view of profitability across regions and currencies. This results in increased sales productivity, better decision-making, and improved sales margins: 

5–10% increase in margins for specific sales categories 

  • 83% reduction in employee time spent on sales meeting preparation 
  • 56 hours of IT resources saved annually 

Infor Value+ Vendor Performance Insights aggregates data from purchase orders to ensure the most optimal vendor selection.  This lowers risk of late deliveries and streamlines production for better manufacturing efficiency and throughput: 

  • 5% penalty cost avoidance (up to €30,000 per tank) 
  • 99% reduction in employee time spent on vendor selection 
  • Less than 7 days to implement 

Infor Value+ Vendor Compliance Checks continuously cross-references open orders against the latest exclusion list information to maintain compliance with import/export regulations:  

  • 17 hours saved per day on incomplete manual checks 
  • 100% ERP compliance with real-time, accurate verification 
  • Less than 30 days to implement 

Infor Gen AI improves the productivity, accuracy, and consistency of item master data quality project to reduce inventory costs, optimize pricing, and create faster quotes: 

  • 95% faster data remediation 
  • 7 years saved in project completion time 
  • 5% decrease in overall inventory costs through better inventory rotation and reduced safety stock levels. 
The Technology: 

Pfaudler is leveraging Infor GenAI and Infor Value+ solutions packaged with Infor Velocity Suite. This package pulls together advanced technologies from Infor’s Industry Cloud Platform to make process innovation faster and simpler. Infor Value+ is a catalog of prebuilt Infor ERP solution add-ons that utilize a select combination AI, GenAI, RPA, and other advanced technologies. Infor GenAI is embedded across Infor CloudSuite to write, summarize, and analyze within business processes. 

Disruptive Factor: 

Thanks to Infor Vendor Compliance Check, our sanctioned entity verification process has transformed from a labor-intensive challenge into an effortless, reliable, and adaptable system. This is especially critical with global tariff measures driving frequent updates to sanctioned lists. We no longer worry or spend time on manual checks, but instead focus on delivering quality products, knowing we are fully compliant with import/export regulations. 

The big challenge was in conducting continuous, accurate analyses for every open customer and purchase order—especially when projects span six to ten months. Our compliance checks were performed when orders are created and shipped, taking approximately five minutes per order for over 200 orders processed daily.  Our goal was to check more than 3,000 open orders daily, but it would consume hundreds of hours and still leave room for human error. While custom compliance solutions were available, they came with steep price tags, making them impractical for long-term implementation. 

Infor Value+ Vendor Compliance Checks is a game changer because now we have a fully automated solution that is fast and accurate.  Information from sanctioned lists is fed into the Infor Data Lake, where it’s combined with data on all open customer and purchase orders. Infor AI cross-references open orders against the latest exclusion list information. This process generates a dashboard that flags any instances of non-compliance for us to take immediate action. 

Shining Moment: 

Delivering high-quality tanks on time is mission-critical for Pfaudler for the pharmaceutical industry. These tanks are essential for producing life-saving medical products, and any delay could be life threating.  With such quick success with Infor innovation solutions, we are confident our partnership with Infor will give us the agility needed to maintain on time delivery to our customers. As a result, we increase customer trust that they can rely on us to manufacture the life-saving drugs. 

About GMM Pfaudler

GMM Pfaudler delivers corrosion-resistant technologies, systems and services worldwide and remains the preferred choice by consistently providing its customers in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries with innovative and cost-effective solutions. 

GMM Pfaudler has 19 manufacturing locations with an extensive sales and service network and employs more than 2000 people across 4 continents.