- Finished goods stocks already down 20%: target 35%
- Massively reduced overtime
- Planners respond accurately and quickly to 'what ifs'
- Visibility of manpower and machine capacity, bottlenecks etc
- Made sense out of the complexity
- Enabled flexibility and responsiveness
Found the best order in complexity
1 min read
Making sense of complexity, itself brought about by the need to diversify and to create flexibility and responsiveness, is getting easier for cigar manufacturer Gallaher because of its advanced planning and scheduling (APS) system, which now manages its multi-stage, multi-product factory in Cardiff, South Wales.
Julian Morgan, Gallaher's resources planning manager, describes production as very complicated, with five sub-processes in separate parts of the plant that transform blended tobacco and wrappers into packed products – with thousands of routes and options according to materials, the SKU and even destination.
Getting lines balanced with the best mix of machines is a considerable task. But there's also the key matter of optimising for the big picture. Until last summer, that was being done on manpower planning spreadsheets. And the result was over-production of some items and stock-outs on others.
Morgan opted for Workplace Systems' WorkPlanner APS to solve its problems while also tackling the linked but separate issues of longer range demand, capacity and business planning. And it's been a resounding success, with the system now taking input from Gallaher's UK forecast sales, and SAP APO for the export market, before generating a 36 month plan for business guidance, with year one more fixed, and months one and two fixed quota.
"It's spreadsheet-driven, but the power of the APS is in the speed with which it transforms that data into robust, optimised plans," says Morgan. "We went live last July and we've been running planning so far on a monthly basis, generating cost-optimised and capacity-constrained production plans for all the sub-processes as they relate to one another – and reaching out to upstream and downstream. We'll take that up to weekly planning, but already finished goods stocks have reduced by 20%."
And there's more. Planned maintenance is due to be linked into APS, with the objective of getting it away from expensive weekend working, and into normal production hours. "The APS has the freedom to move production up and down across the sub-processes, and to adjust routings and machine utilisation to re-optimise for machines taken out."
But the system is also enabling planners to respond quickly to 'what ifs' around forecast inaccuracy, or new business, new brands, campaigns and the like. "We can now support business development right from the start."
Key benefits
