Schur drives packaging innovation, automation, and efficiency with Dynamics 365

Schur, based in Denmark, is a packaging company that manufactures cartons and other packaging materials and provides end-to-end production solutions for customers across the globe. The company has facilities in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and the United States.

In an effort to improve its purchasing and production processes, improve the customer experience, and get more out of its data, Schur implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365 including Dynamics 365 Sales, Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Microsoft Power Pages. With this solution, Schur has standardized product design and development, production, and planning, increased warehouse automation, and provided business leaders with more accurate data. Schur has also reduced manual tasks while giving customers a better and more unified experience.

The leader of the pack

Schur is a family-owned packaging company that has been the “leader of the pack” since 1846. Founded in Denmark, the company has continued to grow and today delivers innovative packaging solutions to customers worldwide. 

Schur specializes in carton packaging, flexible packaging, roll stock, and labels. Custom packaging products range from bags for food products and medical devices to pizza and chocolate boxes. In addition to providing custom packaging, Schur provides tailor-made packaging systems for consumer product companies. These systems include bag and carton fillers, tapping machinery, and pallet wrappers.

Innovation has played a key role in the company’s growth and success, accelerating its journey to becoming the “leader of the pack.” To drive innovation, Schur relies heavily on automation in its factories and warehouses. Because Schur produces highly customized packaging based on specific customer requirements, it operates on very low margins. Therefore, constant optimization is necessary to help it remain competitive and profitable. To better support these goals and align with the company’s increasing focus on adopting cloud technologies, Schur sought to streamline, standardize, and optimize core processes across all business units. 

A platform for automation

Schur was looking for an agile platform to scale across its many diverse and highly automated businesses. The platform needed to support integrations with state-of-the-art computer-aided design (CAD) systems, automated warehousing systems and robots, and manufacturing execution systems (MES). The platform also needed to provide world-class reporting, analytics, and AI capabilities. 

Schur also sought to eliminate manual tasks. “To manage the purchase of raw materials for customers, we had manual processes and a lot of emailing back and forth,” says Lone Lehd-Olesen, Customer Care Director at Schur Pack Denmark. “With the system we used to manage purchases, it was also sometimes challenging to get accurate stock counts and ensure fast delivery.”

In addition to improving its purchasing system, Schur wanted to replace its disparate sales systems and create one source for all customer data. The company also wanted to improve the overall customer experience by making communication and ordering faster and more efficient. Finally, it sought to improve business decision-making by increasing its business intelligence and data analysis capabilities.

Schur found what it was looking for in Dynamics 365. Schur had previously worked closely with Microsoft Partner Columbus Global to implement Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. Therefore, when the company decided to expand its Microsoft footprint by implementing Dynamics 365 Sales and Supply Chain Management, it turned to Columbus Global for assistance. To date, Schur has implemented Dynamics 365 in three carton packaging facilities in northern Europe. Additionally, plans are underway to adopt Dynamics 365 in seven additional facilities, including flexible packaging plants in Australia and the United States, and a production facility in Denmark that manufactures tailor-made packaging systems.

Through these integrated Dynamics 365 technologies, Schur now has a centralized solution for managing critical business processes across the business, including sales and customer master data, product data and development, production and planning, shop floor and plant maintenance processes, quality, warehouse and logistics, procurement, financials, employee time and attendance, and reporting. “With Dynamics 365, we have a platform that aligns perfectly with our cloud strategy and vision. We saw this as not just an ERP implementation, but as a comprehensive platform for digitization that can streamline our entire business,” says Jan Damkjær, Group Digitization Director at Schur.

Speed to market

When a new customer order is received, it flows from the sales department to the engineering department, where the packaging is custom designed before going to production. 

Leads and opportunities are captured in Dynamics 365 Sales and then converted to sales orders in the Lean Projects Print & Packaging solution; a specialized packaging solution built into Dynamics 365. The Lean Projects sales configurator calculates prices and prepares orders for production, including creating custom tooling and bills of materials (BOMs). The configurator features an optimizer that enhances the production order setup to accommodate mix sheets, raw materials, and production flows. Mix sheets can be complex. For example, a juice carton consists of multiple layers, including paperboard, polyethylene, and aluminum foil.

Within the solution, an integration with the ArtiosCAD software automatically creates a BOM and any customer-specific tool specifications needed for production. The Lean Projects solution also automatically creates the purchase order for these materials in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. This integration with Dynamics 365 optimizes product development, planning, and production.

By using Dynamics 365, Schur has standardized its development, purchasing, and production processes, helping the Denmark-based packaging plants efficiently produce more than one billion finished goods each year. All product data, including pricing and BOMs, is stored in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. The company’s Denmark facilities also rely on Supply Chain Management for production planning, using data in the solution to schedule production runs. “Once we have our facilities in Germany up and running on Dynamics 365, we will be able to optimize planning across the company,” says Damkjær. Additionally, Schur Germany will further enhance production processes through an integration with sensors on packaging plant production machinery via Sensor Data Intelligence. Through this integration, operators and supervisors will be able to monitor raw material usage and order status in real time. Schur has also simplified the previously time-consuming pre-cost and post-cost calculations, and the tool purchasing processes. “In our previous system, we didn’t have a lot of visibility into what our customers ordered, and it was a manual process with a lot of emailing and archiving files,” says Allan Laursen, Director of Operations at Schur. “With Dynamics 365, we can go directly to the purchase order, which already has all the information we need in one place, whether it’s the raw materials ordered or the estimated costs. That’s a huge time saver, and it’s easier for us to create repeat orders as well.”

Driving warehouse automation and enabling faster decisions 

Dynamics 365 is the backbone that supports the company’s automated warehouses, which operate all day, every day. Schur’s automated warehouses use advanced technologies such as robotics and conveyor systems to efficiently manage the storage, retrieval, and handling of goods with minimal human intervention. In these facilities, automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RSs) store, retrieve, and pack the finished products. This automation enhances operational efficiency, accuracy, and safety while reducing labor costs and optimizing space utilization.

This integration is enabled by Dynamics 365 and uses the standard material handling equipment interface MHAX to ensure seamless data flow and real-time updates. In addition, mobile devices equipped with apps that are created in Microsoft Power Apps are used to manage warehouse tasks such as line clearance and truck operations, enhancing efficiency and transparency. “Dynamics 365 supports our operational automation and optimization, which we have focused on for a long time,” says Damkjær. “With Dynamics 365 integrated into our warehouse operations, for example, we can continue to operate at large volumes without having to add more people.”

Dynamics 365 is also helping Schur enhance accuracy and visibility, enabling quicker decision making for business leaders. “In our previous environment, it was challenging to get accurate numbers for production orders,” says Laursen. “Dynamics 365 gives us an enterprise system that helps us perform the right calculations and cost analysis to ensure we are using the right data.” For instance, the sales configurator gives Schur a more accurate estimating tool and better visibility into costs for each project. “We are more in control of our data now, which means we can be more data-driven overall,” says Laursen.

Delivering better customer experiences 

With its new customer portal, built on Power Pages, Schur is providing better customer experiences by giving customers self-service capabilities. “The customer portal saves our sales representatives at least an hour a day each because they no longer need to send emails or call customers to update them on stock levels or what is in production,” says Lehd-Olesen. “Our customers have all that data available to them in real time any time they need it. They can also provide their input so we can optimize their products and efficiently place repeat orders.” 

Before the new customer portal, each sales rep had to run a report every morning for each of their customers, to get details such as order status, invoice information, and customer-owned material stock levels. The new portal has made the business development team much more effective. Additionally, customers are more satisfied with the new self-service portal, because they can view real-time status at any time. 

The next customer-facing portal to be rolled out on Power Pages is the web center. This solution will centralize the art approval process. The pre-press department will be able to drag designs or art files directly into the web center, where customers can access and approve them. “That process used to involve a lot of back and forth with emails, and customers sometimes lost the files and had to ask us to resend them,” says Lehd-Olesen. “With the web center, customers will have full visibility into all files.”

What’s next 

Schur will continue rolling out Dynamics 365 to plants in Australia, the United States, and five additional locations in Northern Europe. The company also plans to begin implementing Dynamics 365 Field Service, integrating the solution with the existing Dynamics 365 footprint to enhance its service offerings.

Additionally, Schur is expecting to continue its digitization journey, beginning with a project to test Internet of Things (IoT) data integration with Microsoft Fabric. This project will collect IoT data for production order consumption and post-calculations. The company also plans to incorporate Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales and Microsoft 365 Copilot for Finance for AI capabilities, and Microsoft Power Automate to optimize processes. In addition, Schur wants to apply AI on top of IoT data. The integration of machine data and the use of AI for production analysis are expected to reduce production downtime and waste, potentially increasing production efficiency by at least 1 to 2%, which translates to millions of Danish kroner. “We want to use AI to analyze finance data and IoT data from machines,” says Damkjærr. “Our goal is to use AI analysis to identify production trends and optimize operations to possibly reduce costs and waste, and we believe Dynamics 365 and AI technologies can help us get there.”