About CE Produkter
CE Produkter in Unnaryd makes textile fibre applications — materials that soften furniture, dampen sound, clean air and insulate. The company was founded in 1996 on the idea of taking back customers’ production waste and reworking it into new products with new properties. The roots run deeper than that: the Ekman family has produced wadding since 1939, and the company is run today by the fourth generation.
The products are largely made from polyester fibre out of recycled PET bottles. From that raw material come sound absorbers for ventilation, heat pump and construction industries, padding for furniture and bed makers, filter media wherever air needs cleaning, insulation and materials for moulding. Own brands such as Recofelt, Soundfelt® and Airfelt sell across Scandinavia and beyond.
What almost everything leaving the factory has in common is that there is no shelf product. The material is composed to the customer’s need: density, thickness, dimensions, colour and surface finish all vary, and converting is done on an in-house cutting table so the customer can assemble straight into their own production.
The challenge
When every customer has their own material, order entry is harder than it looks. An incoming order is rarely an item number and a quantity. It is a request that refers to the customer’s own naming, an earlier delivery, a drawing or an agreed specification — and it has to be translated into the right item in Garp, with the right dimensions, the right density and the right packaging.
On top of that sit the call-offs. Recurring customers order against framework agreements and agreed prices, often at a steady pace and in volume. Each such line is simple in itself. Together they become a stream that never ends and that always takes priority — because until the order is registered and confirmed, production cannot plan it.
The work lands with the same people who are meant to carry the technical dialogue with customers about materials and product development. That dialogue is what creates the business. Order entry is what eats the hours.
What Alison does
- Incoming orders and call-offs — reads orders arriving by email, as PDF or as free text, and interprets what the customer is actually ordering.
- Item matching — links the order line to the right item in Garp based on specification, the customer’s own naming and previous deliveries.
- Registration in Garp — creates the order with the right quantity, dimensions, price, delivery address and requested date.
- Validation — checks price and terms against agreements and order history, and stops at anything that deviates instead of guessing.
- Order confirmations — confirms the same day, with the right details and the right lead time.
- Customer questions — answers recurring questions about order status and lead times without anyone digging through the system.
- Follow-up — monitors open orders and flags anything at risk of slipping to the right person in time.
The interpretation is the work
Alison works directly in Garp, the same ERP as the rest of the company. No new interface, no integration to maintain on the side, and no change to how the order looks when it arrives from the customer.
What makes the difference is that she does the interpretation every time, with the same care. An order where the customer used their own item name instead of CE’s, a thickness that differs from last time, or a price that does not match the agreement — those are exactly the details that get expensive when they are found on the shop floor.
What Alison is not sure about, she does not register. She hands it to a human with the background gathered, rather than creating an order someone has to correct afterwards.
The effect
- Faster answers — orders are confirmed the same day, not when someone finds a gap.
- The right item from the start — fewer errors discovered at cutting or delivery.
- Production gets the basis earlier — entry is no longer the bottleneck ahead of planning.
- More time for materials and customer dialogue — technical advice and product development instead of order entry.
- Room to grow — more call-offs do not require more hours of admin.
Next steps
Order entry was the first process. The same approach can be applied to quotation replies, delivery monitoring and deviations at goods receipt — process by process, at the pace the business wants.