“Passion for Machining” is Fårbo Manufacturing’s motto. It originates from Fårbo’s corporate culture and the ambition of the management that Fårbo should be an organization that meets customer requirements and wishes in all relevant dimensions. The goal is to be the most committed partner for machining, with management and employees who want to contribute to smart and efficient solutions throughout the business.
In a previous article and in other forums, Mikael Vetterskog, CEO, has spoken about the importance of both management and employees living up to Fårbo’s values and encouraging team spirit. The possibility of training sessions twice a week has been mentioned, as well as the recent challenge where Team Fårbo competed in the Birkebeinerrittet, which is Norway’s largest cycling race, which are examples of initiatives to strengthen team spirit.
Concrete examples of development are the AI efforts that have been made, including an advanced AI agent that handles customer orders and reads emails, interprets PDFs, extracts critical information and feeds Fårbo’s ERP system. Other AI agents handle supplier orders, optimize inventory, and assist production. An ongoing AI project includes AI for delivery notifications from suppliers.
– There is a lot of talk about AI and digitization with us, but I also want to mention the central part of maintaining efficient administration and production, namely our ERP system, says Mikael Vetterskog, who in addition to the CEO role at Fårbo, runs digitization and AI support with great success, which has attracted attention far beyond Fårbo’s production facilities in Fagersta.
Fårbo Manufacturing chose Monitor
Fårbo chose Monitor for its ERP system. In addition to the system itself, Mikael emphasizes an important part of the collaboration with Monitor, namely the possibility of using Monitor’s consultants for business development. This fits in perfectly with Fårbo’s ambition to constantly develop and streamline in order to be at the top in terms of quality, price and delivery precision.
Mikael again: “By daring to get outside help, we speed up our improvement work, and we think that’s smart and effective. It helps us to stay focused on customer jobs, while everyone contributes to continued development. Previously, we met for a full day with one Monitor group, but now there are different groups with different leaders. This has led to us engaging more people with us, knowledge of our common system increases, which in turn increases both commitment and the ability to collaborate. Quite simply, we are becoming more robust, faster and more efficient as an organization.”
Cooperation over many years
Business development with Monitor consultants has been ongoing for almost 10 years. Between meetings with Monitor consultants, which can take place up to four times a year, Fårbo’s management and employees participate in various working groups where tests, implementation and evaluation are carried out to gather questions and views for the next meeting with Monitor. Meetings take place via Teams on an ongoing basis, but the larger meetings take place physically on site at Fårbo, as everyone involved feels that the dialogue is better and more creative, and engages more people in the company than single meetings of a few hours.
Fårbo’s success presented at the Monitor Days in Gävle
Monitor ERP organizes Monitor Days every year. It is a customer event that primarily aims to bring together all Monitor’s customers and offer information about news in the ERP system and mini-courses. This year, the event was held on 28-29 August in Gävle at Monitor ERP Arena. The theme this year was “Level up!”, and one of the aims was for Monitor users to become even better at using the system.
Fårbo was asked earlier this year to be a reference company for one of the event’s main themes.
Monitor wanted to highlight Fårbo as an example of a company that had successfully worked with Monitor’s senior consultants in its business development. Fårbo’s management naturally accepted the opportunity, and Mikael was given the task of presenting the experience to over 1,000 participants at the customer event.
Mikael talked about the development work, the importance of involving all employees and the results.
– We have been able to keep a higher pace in business development, we have made wiser choices along the way, implementation has also been faster when we have been able to brainstorm with experts,” concluded Mikael.
Before the event, a video was recorded and shown before Mikael’s presentation – it can serve as a presentation to those who were not in Gävle (voice in Swedish, though…)!