FACC is very pleased about the Austrian Supply Excellence Award sponsored by the Federal Association for Materials Management, Purchasing and Logistics in Austria (BMO), which FACC received in the category "Special Award". The award-winning project "A-P-A 4.0 Advanced Procurement Administration 4.0" aimed at the digitization and automation of order management as well as downstream logistics and billing processes. It helped FACC to strongly improve its cooperation with suppliers and to increase efficiency and quality throughout the order management process.

"For many years, we have consistently optimized our purchasing and our supply chain. Apart from a cooperative partnership with our suppliers we set great store by process optimization and savings on cost and time. The award has shown that we are on the right track with our Industry 4.0 activities", says Robert Machtlinger, CEO of FACC.

In cooperation with one of the biggest raw materials suppliers for prepregs, Isovolta, and the logistics partner SLS, FACC has largely automated the time-consuming and thus expensive administrative activities in the fields of purchasing and logistics. "It was our declared aim to further intensify the long-standing partnership between FACC and Isovolta and to digitize and automate all ordering, delivery, and billing processes. In doing so, we could reduce expenditure and cost and create a win-win solution for all supply chain partners", says Rudolf Leitner, Executive Vice President of Procurement.

A-P-A 4.0 (Advanced Procurement Administration 4.0) describes a cross-company and interdisciplinary digitization project with a view to ensuring an automated data exchange with no interfaces in the management of ordering, delivery, and billing processes between FACC, Isovolta and SLS Stranzinger Logistik. In the course of three project phases, the management of orders, order changes, order confirmations, as well as the transmission of dispatch notifications and the weekly consignment settlements were automated. Any media disruptions and related sources of error were eliminated effectively. Every year, Isovolta delivers approx. 17,000 rolls of prepreg material to FACC. Before A-P-A 4.0 was introduced, each individual roll had to be administrated individually (e.g. batch management), because 100% traceability is absolutely mandatory in the aviation industry. The project partners have confirmed a reduction of process costs in order management, fewer repeats of inputs and less duplication, as well as fewer data input errors and a higher quality of the data, which resulted in a higher speed and better efficiency and accuracy of the ordering, delivery and billing process.