Planning & Scheduling for Pasta Manufacturing
About the Customer
The Food & Beverage Manufacturing customer is a global manufacturer of high-quality consumer Italian food products including refrigerated pasta, sauces, and ready-made dishes. The brand started in 1962 and has since expanded, now distributing pasta products in 38 different countries.
Project Summary
With the customer's business expanding rapidly in the U.S. market, maintaining an efficient production scheduling process was becoming increasingly difficult to manage manually. Engineering Industries eXcellence's team helped the manufacturer automate, streamline and optimize their U.S. plant production planning and scheduling processes to become more efficient.
Business Drivers
- Paperless, efficient planning and scheduling process
- Planning and scheduling time reduction
- Inventory optimization and cost reduction
- Better resource utilization and prompt reaction to supply chain events
- Improved finite capacity work plan and order tracking
- Asset utilization improvement and reduced machine downtimes
More About The Project
With the customer's business expanding rapidly in the U.S. market, maintaining an efficient production scheduling process was becoming increasingly difficult to manage manually. As sales increased month by month, the company was also experiencing challenges of balancing inventory with sales forecast and ensuring consistent order fulfillment. Their existing processes could simply not handle the amount of growth that they were experiencing. They had outgrown using documents in Excel to manage their complex operations.
Engineering Industries eXcellence's team was contacted to analyze the customer's production planning and scheduling processes and to propose the right software solutions to address them. After examining the customer’s entire manufacturing process, identifying challenges and helping them prioritize needs and goals, our team proposed an integrated set of solutions from the leading sedApta Suite for Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP). With Engineering's experts leading the way, the customer agreed to have our Industries eXcellence team configure and deploy 3 modules from sedApta's offering, including Inventory Planning, Factory Scheduling and Resource & Supply Planning. Our integrated solution helped the customer automate, streamline, and optimize their manufacturing value chain:
- The Inventory Planning module has allowed the customer to create a weekly Master Production Schedule that is driven by individual stock policies per SKU. It aligns the sales forecasts and open orders while taking into account the batch logic on the production floor level.
- The Factory Scheduling module was configured by our team to model all of the production lines and constraints of the production facility. It gave the customer the ability to take the weekly production plan and turn it into a finite schedule at the click of a mouse.
- The Resource & Supply Planning module has the job of coordinating all raw material needs from the scheduled production in the previous two modules. By using minimum stock and coverage policies, the purchasing department now receives weekly reports of materials to be purchased to coordinate with future planned production.
Engineering's Advantage
Engineering Industries eXcellence's specialists worked very closely with the key customer stakeholders of each module to understand the current processes and define the to-be processes. One of the main goals was to extract the experience and knowledge that each stakeholder had about the business and configure it into each software tool to provide more transparency to the entire organization. Our Industries eXcellence team made sure to include the customer's end users through every step of the process, providing weekly update meetings where use case scenarios were dissected and developed in greater detail. Leveraging this collaborative methodology, we were able to use our knowledge of the software and industry best practices to guide this leading pasta manufacturer to the best customized Industry 4.0 solution for their business.
