When choosing Proficy Scheduler to manage production, the values should be felt quickly in daily planning, and at AVK Plast A/S, many of these values came extremely fast.
Anne Kathrine Pedersen explains: “We got value right away. In fact, from the moment we went live with Proficy Scheduler, my planner and I saved 2-4 hours a day combined on planning. Before, when we needed to change a date, we had to manually go in and make all the changes, and it took a long time. It could take us hours before we saw the consequences of moving something. Now we can see that immediately, and that’s one of the low-hanging fruits you get with Proficy Scheduler, but still such an important one. Another thing is that we have much better oversight of when our machines are done producing. Now we can see far into the future when we need to make a shift, which used to be manually monitored and a guess as to when to change over. Now we can go into Proficy Scheduler and see that well in advance, which means we can plan these shifts in a way that minimizes downtime, and we can even distribute them more evenly. A third thing is that we can now see when we’re running low on raw materials. We could technically see this in Axapta before, but it required manual handling. That meant we frequently didn’t have the raw materials we needed, even though we should have.”
Proficy Scheduler is the crystal ball that provides better customer service and significantly reduces downtime
“Today, we can predict so many things much earlier, and we can also see further into the future regarding when we can produce. This means we can now give customers delivery updates earlier than before and notify them in good time if an item isn’t in stock, which means the delivery has to be postponed. These values can be seen on the bottom line,” Anne Kathrine Pedersen explains and continues: “We have two production halls, and in one we have 6 machines, and in the other, we have 1 crane. We use the crane to change over. One of the big problems we had before was booking the crane, which could lead to conflicts if some people wanted to use it at the same time as others. But that problem is gone now because we can predict when we will have a shift, and therefore when the crane will be needed. We can easily rearrange everything so that all the shifts make sense and avoid conflicts. Now we can also predict when a machine will be finished, and that has really reduced the time we spend with machines not producing. For example, when we need to change colours on a machine to run a limited batch, I can now see that if we do the changeover at 1 PM, we can switch back the next day at 7 AM, meaning the machine will be down for as little time as possible. We couldn’t do that before. Now I can also see in advance when we start to run into problems with the stock of a certain component, so we can better prepare for it.”