Aicomp and T.Con digitalize Rondo Ganahl’s corrugated production with SAP

Aicomp and T.Con have supported Rondo Ganahl, a paper packaging company, in making planning more transparent, digitalizing the shop floor, and controlling material flow with SAP software solutions. 

For the project, Aicomp and T.Con say they utilized a combination of the German software giant’s SAP PP/DS (Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling), SAP Digital Manufacturing for the shop floor, and SAP EWM (Extended Warehouse Management) for production logistics. 

“Working with Aicomp and T.Con was and continues to be excellent — from the first preparatory talks through the expert consulting and the official project start in autumn 2024 to the recent ‘Go Live’ and beyond,” comments Midhad Hodzic, head of SAP Services at Rondo Ganahl. 

“The initial feedback and experiences of our colleagues at the site who are already working with the implemented solution have also been consistently very positive.”

The interplay of the three SAP solutions allowed Rondo Ganahl to make its complex packaging production more manageable across several production stages with variant diversity, according to the packaging software consultancies. 

“Corrugated is a make-to-order business almost by definition,” Jens Hennecke, Group CEO at Aicomp, tells Packaging Insights. “Nearly every order is a customer-specific design: dimensions, board grade and flute, print image, die-cut, glue pattern, stacking, and palletization.”

“Each of those decisions has to exist in the ERP system as master data (material master, bill of materials, routing, packaging instruction) before a single sheet can be produced.”

Managing corrugated variants 

Rondo Ganahl had already implemented an SAP ERP template prior to the recent SAP project completed alongside Aicomp and T.Con. 

Jens Hennecke, Group CEO at Aicomp.“However, key building blocks for modern production control were missing,” according to T.Con. 

“Production control was handled by a specialized industry MES system (MES Kiwiplan). This covered many requirements, but increasingly reached its limits when it came to new digital tasks, particularly in terms of integration into SAP processes and end-to-end planning across several production stages.”

Discussing the significance of variant configuration and automated master data for corrugated packaging, Aicomp’s Hennecke highlights that if that master data is created manually, variant management, not machine capacity, becomes the real bottleneck. 

“It slows down quoting, it delays order release, and it introduces errors that only surface on the shop floor or, worse, at the customer’s line. Two packaging items that differ only in their print image should not require two separate rounds of manual data maintenance. Getting variants under control is what makes the rest of the production process controllable at all.”

Moving to integrated production control

Similarly to Rondo Ganahl, Hennecke expects more packaging manufacturers to move toward an integrated production control, but “for two reasons that have little to do with technology enthusiasm.”

“The first is timing: many producers are re-evaluating their entire system landscape as part of the move from SAP ECC to S/4HANA. That is the moment when questions about the specialized MES layer, about planning, and about warehouse execution get asked together rather than separately.”

“The second is data. Traceability requirements, sustainability reporting, and customer audits all assume a consistent record from raw material to finished pallet. That is hard to deliver when planning, execution, and logistics run on separate systems with interfaces in between.”

At the same time, Hennecke acknowledges that such a transition of industry-specific systems will not happen overnight. “Many plants will operate hybrid setups for years. What is changing is the direction. The integrated core is becoming the default assumption rather than the exception.”

Previously, at Aicomp Summit 2026, Packaging Insights spoke to Kai Aldinger, global lead for forest and paper packaging at SAP, about the evolving software solutions for the paper-based packaging industry. We also discussed T.Con’s collaboration with SAP to develop digital manufacturing software for corrugated packaging facilities.