Founded in 1988, E. Hofmann Plastics provides full-service, in-house design, manufacturing, decoration, assembly, packaging, and storage to clients in the food and chemical industries. Focused primarily on North America (some exports to Europe), E. Hofmann manufactures a wide variety of heavy-duty and tamper-evident pails, dairy cups, deli containers, drink cups and square pails. The firm even runs its own truck fleet to ensure “just-in-time” deliveries to its customers.

Vital Statistics

Established for over 30 years, located in a 175,000 sq. ft. plant with over 60 machines ranging from injection molding, thermoformers, printing machines and in-mold labelers. Standard runs of 20,000 to 80,000 pieces. Custom runs of at least 2,000 units. More than 80,000 injection molded parts produced daily. Over 21 million thermo-formed parts manufactured weekly.

Key Challenges

Over the past decade, E. Hofmann Plastics has faced a variety of significant shifts, including two changes of ownership and currency fluctuations that negatively affected the firm’s price advantage with U.S. customers. To survive and thrive, management had to abandon assumptions and react only to the facts to better manage costs and productivity while increasing sales and profit margins.

Why CyFrame?

E. Hofmann Plastics was committed to working with a company that had created an ERP system specifically for the plastics industry. Owner Paul Kalia recognized the value of dealing directly with an owner-operated Canadian company to get personal service while leveraging a long-standing relationship with a supplier that truly understands business and specifically plastics. As importantly, CyFrame continues to develop new capabilities and modules in response to customer demand and a constantly evolving marketplace. This would allow E. Hofmann to do more with CyFrame and it’s ERP system as time progressed.

Solution

In 2008, CyFrame implemented and integrated its ERP system for E. Hofmann with a focus on the finance, sales, purchasing and production modules. Over the years, E. Hofmann would also benefit from its wireless physical inventory, real-time PLC machine monitoring, inventory by location, scrap reporting, and production scheduling and EDI (Electronic Data Interface).

Benefits

In essence, CyFrame’s ERP helped E. Hofmann Plastics assess how it ran the business and use historical and real-time data to challenge its assumptions. Faced with the facts, E. Hofmann Plastics was able to identify its most profitable product lines, then heighten its focus on downtime, reject rates, scheduling and both operating and material costs. The firm supported those product lines with its best sales and marketing efforts to grow the top and bottom line while improving productivity and customer satisfaction. At the same time through EDI, they automated key customer transactions and eliminated substantial manual order entry to the extent the company was able to eliminate two full-time resources.