MTO Manufacturer Still Using Excel
In a Make-To-Order cosmetic product manufacturing, checking material availability usually takes a long time, sometimes it takes too long, that customers would rather cancel the order instead. It is very hard to keep up with order changes and respond to when this happens often. A Japan-based company specializing in: powders, lip sticks, and cream—experienced this setback.
The company utilized an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software as the core system in the past. This proved to be incompatible with their production setting because it took them a long time to complete all their processes and it was simply unstable. They even had to manually schedule using MS Excel for their scheduling because of this issue.
Finite Capacity Scheduling
However, these matters were resolved through the installation of a Finite Capacity Scheduler (FCS) software called Asprova. The company wanted to combine the two concepts to form a process that would utilize both MRP and FCS. And they succeeded by overcoming many challenges in conceptualizing how this would work (for a more detailed explanation click here—case study 14).
After switching from ERP to FCS, the company experienced a considerable reduction in manual workload, precision in scheduling, realized functionality of MRP, and realized the computation of synchronized MRP and FCS in only 6 minutes—now that’s a quick (and also accurate) response to frequent order changes.
