Electrical products (Electric wire, cable, electronic connectors, etc.) are the main merchandise of our Hong-Kong based manufacturer. In their earlier years, this company relied on Excel, human schedulers, and an ERP for their production planning. However, in the long run, when the variety of items reached 10,000 and the orders rose to more than 5,000 a month, it made the schedule managers perplexed because of the difficulty of making a production plan on excel. They tried company’s ERP but according to the IT manager, “Our ERP has a scheduling function, but it is difficult to create a feasible plan and it is too slow. Therefore we had to search for a more professional, advanced scheduler.”
To improve production efficiency and reduce costs
Because it has become too complex to make a production plan based on MS Excel they needed a better scheduler, one that is more flexible. “Our product technology is not very complicated, but the convergence, decomposition, and other modes of producing process make the production very flexible. When rush orders come in or the yield is not satisfactory it’s really hard to handle, as we are have to solely rely on our experience,” the production management department leader said.
After assessing their needs, they decided to try our Finite Capacity Scheduling software—Asprova, that is known all throughout the world for its flexibility as a scheduler. They did this to address the scheduling complexity brought about by their businesses’ expansion, to optimize capacity, and to increase production efficiency.
Implementation effects
After five months of transition, the results of switching to Asprova became evident. The managers noticed that production time was reduced significantly. According to their data, it used to take about 2 hours to make a plan and even longer if rush orders came in. Now, it only takes 15-30 minutes. The scope of their scheduling also expanded considerably. In the past, the company only planned its main processes, but with Asprova the copper twisting and extrusion processes has been included in the planning. The most amazing effect after Asprova implementation is when plan execution reached 90%. Due to the lack of an effective management basis, the plan execution rate used to be very low. After introducing Asprova, the managers worked according to Asprova’s scheduling results, increasing production efficiency and at the same time reducing costs.