Thanks largely to the global growth of the wine industry, MALA Verschluss-Systeme has watched its business boom. The 25-year-old German company is one of the world’s leading producers of aluminum screw-top bottle caps for spirits, wine, champagne, and alcohol-free beverages. Its bottle caps are works of art, and MALA takes great pride in supporting each beverage producer’s brand down to the smallest detail.

“With faveo 365, we can serve our US customers more promptly and professionally, processing orders and answering questions faster.”

Andreas Lange, Owner and Chief Executive Officer, MALA Verschluss-Systeme

German manufacturer better serves US customers, saves money with cloud ERP

Customer Name: MALA Verschluss-Systeme Industry: ManufacturingCountry or Region: GermanyCustomer Website: www.mala-usa.com Employee Size: 240Partner Name: faveo

Customer ProfileMALA Verschluss-Systeme Gmbh is one of the world’s largest producers of aluminum screw-top bottle caps for spirits, wine, champagne, and alcohol-free beverages. The company is based in Bad Liebenstein, Germany, and has annual revenues of €38 million (US$40.4 million).

To meet the growing demand for its product in the United States and reduce customer delivery times there, MALA opened a sales office and factory in California. However, the company wanted to manage the US facility from Germany and could not do so with the older enterprise resource planning (ERP) and financial systems that it used in Germany. But it was not keen on investing in hardware and software infrastructure in California or hiring an IT staff there to manage it.

For several years, production management, finance, and customer service staff in Germany managed US operations using spreadsheets, email, and phone calls—not an ideal solution. It took a couple of days to issue an order confirmation to US customers, the staff struggled to plan US production schedules, and MALA couldn’t answer customer questions as promptly or professionally as it wanted to.

Cloud-based ERPMALA was sold on the benefits of cloud computing and was already considering replacing its existing ERP and finance solutions in Germany with a cloud-based ERP. The company realized that its US facility provided the perfect opportunity to try out such a system and see how it worked.

With a cloud solution, there would be no need for a hardware or software investments, and it could easily manage the factory with a small local

staff in California and remote support from employees in Germany.

MALA considered SAP Business One, but it was too expensive and complex. Instead, it chose faveo 365, an ERP system based on Microsoft Dynamics NAV and hosted in Microsoft Azure. “It was important to us to choose a trusted, well-known cloud solution with a strong brand, and we felt that Dynamics NAV was such a solution,” says Andreas Lange, Owner and Chief Executive Officer of MALA Verschluss-Systeme. “Plus, our employees work with Microsoft Office every day, so faveo 365 looked and felt familiar to them.”

A member of the Microsoft Partner Network with a specialization in Dynamics NAV, faveo enhances Dynamics NAV with functionality tailored to the needs of small and midsize companies, and integrates it with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Microsoft Office 365. Hosting faveo 365 in Azure relieves these firms from the hassle and expense of deploying and caring for IT infrastructure: faveo takes care of deploying, updating, and maintaining the software. Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite is an essential part of faveo 365; customers can use it to predict sales forecast and need analysis.

faveo used Azure platform services to build faveo 365 in the cloud. Dynamics NAV runs in Azure Virtual Machines and uses the Azure SQL Database. The partner also used Azure App Service to build portals that enable MALA customers to check order progress. Azure Search provides fast search

“Calculating prices and produc-tion schedules was previously very time-consuming and manual. Today it’s fully automated and far more precise. We get reports at the push of a button.”

Andreas Lange, Owner and Chief Executive Officer, MALA Verschluss-Systeme

Products• Microsoft Azure - Azure App Service - Azure DNS Services - Azure Search

- Azure SQL Database - Azure Virtual Machines• Microsoft Dynamics NAV

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INTHIS SUMMARY. Document published January 2017.

through large customer, inventory, scheduling, and other databases.

“Using Azure PaaS enabled us to focus on customer value generation,” says Christoph Eberz, Chief Executive Officer at faveo. “While Microsoft does the heavy lifting of developing and running the Azure platform services, we can invest our resources in developing services with an enormous business value for our customers and recurring revenue for our company.”

Better serve US customersUsing faveo 365, a handful of MALA employees in Germany manage the company’s US factory from more than 6,000 miles away. When a customer order is received and entered into faveo 365, the customer receives a confirmation within minutes. Processing a work order takes 3 minutes, versus the 10 to 12 minutes that it takes MALA in Germany.

From the order, faveo 365 designs a complete manufacturing production plan, taking into account current inventory, flagging materials that need to be ordered, and calculating a ship date and delivery time. US customer service staff members who visit wineries and other customers can access production data from smartphones and tablets with no complicated sign-in procedures, messy virtual private network connections, or, best of all, spreadsheets.

“With faveo 365, we can serve our US customers more promptly and professionally, processing orders and answering questions faster,” Lange says.

Detailed reports, lower costsUsing faveo 365, MALA also gets far more accurate production-planning data than before—and gets it automatically. “Calculating prices and production schedules was previously very time-consuming and manual,” Lange says. “Today it’s fully automated and far more precise. We get reports at the push of a button.”

Lange and his team know the status of each order, exactly which materials are on hand, and which need to be ordered. From faveo 365 reports, MALA can also discern trends to do better forecasting. California wineries, for example, were favoring certain bottle cap colors over others, which would normally not have been readily apparent to management in Germany. This insight let managers order higher volumes of those colors and achieve price breaks.

By using a cloud-based ERP, MALA avoided the cost of setting up and caring for US-based IT infrastructure and extra travel costs to and from Germany.

Soon, a companywide solutionWith the success of faveo 365 as the ERP system for its US plant, MALA plans to use it to replace its older software systems in Germany, which are outdated and difficult to use. “All our employees, in sales, finance, production, and other areas, will have access to faveo 365, which will grow with our business,” says Lange. “In faveo 365 we have a future-proof solution that covers all the functionality we need today and tomorrow.”

“All our employees, in sales, finance, production, and other areas will have access to faveo 365, which will grow with our business.”

Andreas Lange, Owner and Chief Executive Officer, MALA Verschluss-Systeme