Mar 1, 2020
About the Customer
Engineering Industries eXcellence is working with a new customer to help them automate and optimize their Production Planning & Scheduling processes. The customer is a leading manufacturer with more than 20 years of experience delivering world-class machining and tooling products and services. A global company with its main manufacturing plant operating in northern Mexico, the customer is known for the most advanced technology in precision machining such as turning, milling, boring and threading.
The Customer’s Challenge
Because of the wide spectrum of machining services they provide for an even wider spectrum of different products and industrial sectors, efficiency and accuracy in their production planning and scheduling processes are absolutely critical in order deliver quality products to their customers in a timely and cost-effective manner.
Before this project, the customer was scheduling production manually and in an inconsistent way. Some of the major pain points the customer was suffering from as a result include:
- Difficulty in coordinating with suppliers to get raw materials. This led to either a lack of raw materials to produce orders when needed, or costly excesses in inventory of the wrong raw materials.
- Setup time was out of control. The customer was losing a lot of production time on the machines, because they were not optimizing or sequencing correctly.
- Often, the customer could not deliver on time due to these inefficiencies. Excessive late orders led to penalties that negatively impacted their revenues.
About the Project
The customer decided to invest in digitalization, and Engineering Industries eXcellence was brought in as their strategic partner in order to help them identify and implement the right solution to overcome these challenges. Starting with the first implementation covering the customer’s forging area production lines, our technical team will be delivering a complete production scheduling system leveraging Siemens Opcenter Advanced Planning and Scheduling (formerly known as Preactor APS) software.
The advanced scheduling solution we deliver will enable the customer to automatically generate a feasible production schedule based on the actual capacity and availability of their resources and process constraints. The system will optimize resource utilization, order sequencing and order prioritization taking labor, materials and tooling into account. The customer will be able to schedule production orders quickly using intelligent built-in rules, and their planning manager will be able to interact with the schedule manually to make changes based on experience or new information. Advanced scheduling will enable them to optimize decision-making related to overtime, order prioritization, production batches, order delivery negotiation and order processing. Management will be able to monitor production processes and material levels, while an integration with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) will facilitate accurate material planning and ordering.
Engineering’s Advantage
With the system designed and configured to meet the specific needs of the customer’s production environment, our team plans to go onsite in the next weeks in order to implement it at their manufacturing plant. We will support the go-live and provide training to end users in order to ensure that they reap the full value of their investment. As a result, our customer will be able to increase plant efficiency, improve resource utilization, optimize inventory, maximize throughput and ensure on-time delivery to their customers.
Engineering Industries eXcellence has been delivering software for production planning and scheduling to manufacturers across all industry sectors for over a decade. We believe in the flexibility, reliability and scalability of the products we work with, which is why we are proud to deliver them to our customers in order to help them transform and grow their business.
