Achieving Production Control: scansteel foodtech’s Transformation with Proficy Scheduler

scansteel foodtech A/S is a Danish manufacturer of advanced machinery and complete processing lines for the food, pet food, and cheese industries. Based in Slagelse, Denmark, and founded in 2001, the company supplies a broad portfolio of equipment – including grinders, mixers, emulsifiers, and pumps – engineered to support demanding, high-quality food processing requirements.

Before implementing Proficy Scheduler scansteel relied on a combination of Excel spreadsheets and MS Project to plan production. Different parts of the process were managed in separate files and project plans, and none of these tools were connected. Any change in one place had to be updated manually in several others, which was time-consuming and prone to error.

This fragmented approach meant there was no single, reliable view of capacity, load, or deadlines. Plans often conflicted; information fell between the cracks, and it was difficult to see the knock-on effects of delays or new orders. To compensate, scansteel had to hold large, frequent coordination meetings just to piece together the real production picture. These meetings were expensive, slowed decision-making, and still didn’t fully prevent overloading situations or unrealistic schedules on key resources in the factory.

Faced with fragmented planning in Excel and MS Project, scansteel’s production and operations leadership realized that the existing approach could no longer support the company’s growth or complexity, so they initiated a search for a dedicated planning tool. Based on a maturity analysis, they chose Proficy Scheduler because it could quickly give them one integrated production plan, reduce the need for costly coordination meetings, and later integrate with their ERP system. The decision was therefore both operational, improving day-to-day planning, and strategic, providing a solid foundation for future growth and scalability.

“We weren’t able to manage everything in a unified way, and things were falling through the cracks. That led to a lot of big meetings where we tried to bring everyone together and talk everything through. But those meetings were very expensive to have, so we needed a system that could bring it all together – and Proficy Scheduler could do that for us.” - Stefan Kock Larsen, Production Planner, scansteel foodtech

Customers should feel the value of Proficy Scheduler from day one – and that shapes the way we design every implementation. Our goal is not a long, drawn-out project, but a focused process that gets you up and running in a matter of weeks, with concrete improvements visible as soon as you go live.

At scansteel, the activation was structured over just five weeks, supplemented by an additional week of consultancy. With our Scheduler expert, Anders, closely involved throughout, the focus was always on fast, practical results rather than theoretical designs. Together with the scansteel team, Anders worked through their real data, real processes, and real bottlenecks, so the system would support daily planning from the moment it was switched on.

A key part of that approach is helping customers prioritize. As soon as the possibilities of Proficy Scheduler became clear, scansteel’s wish list grew quickly – new features, integrations, and process changes. However, our Scheduler experts are obliged to challenge that, to keep the scope tight and concentrate on what truly matters for an effective first phase. That discipline is what keeps the implementation lean, ensures the system stays simple and manageable, and – most importantly – guarantees that the business starts getting value immediately instead of waiting months for benefits to materialize. Stefan explains: 

“During the implementation period, we also clarified our scope. Naturally, there were a lot of wishes for how we wanted everything to work and what the system should be able to do, but Anders was very good at keeping things tight and focused on the most important elements, instead of trying to include everything at once. We weren’t supposed to do that – and that was really the right approach for us. One of the exercises I remember best during the implementation was that we had to imagine something had gone wrong six months from now, out in the future. That exercise was so valuable, because it gave a clear picture of all the skepticism around the project and showed that it was okay to bring that into the conversation. It gave us a sense of calm that our doubts were being surfaced and taken seriously.”

Before Proficy Scheduler, scansteel lacked a reliable, end-to-end overview of capacity and workload. Planning data was scattered across different spreadsheets and project files, and no one had a clear, shared picture of how much work was actually in the pipeline or when key resources would be available. As a result, the company often said “yes” to new orders without really knowing whether they had the capacity to deliver on time.

In manufacturing, this pattern typically leads to overloaded teams, constant rescheduling, missed deadlines, quality issues, and an unhealthy culture of firefighting, where people are always reacting to problems instead of planning ahead. It also makes collaboration difficult: each department works from its own version of the truth; priorities clash, and trust between teams can erode when promises are made to customers that production cannot realistically keep.

With Proficy Scheduler in place, scansteel has gained a single, consolidated view of all projects and resources. Working together in one shared system means that sales, planning, and production can see the same plan, understand the same constraints, and make decisions based on the same data. Planners and management can now see, in one plan, how work is loaded over time, where bottlenecks will appear, and what it takes to meet specific deadlines. This transparency has changed behavior: instead of accepting every request by default, scansteel can now challenge unrealistic deadlines, prioritize more intelligently, and commit to dates based on real capacity – not guesswork.

“We also have much better visibility into how much we’re actually doing, and we’ve realized that we had too much work and too many tasks with deadlines that were simply too short. We’ve been saying yes to work blindly, because we didn’t have the overview and couldn’t see whether we really had the resources to deliver it. We’re really getting a lot of value now using Proficy Scheduler.

The conversations we have about planning now are completely different from anything we’ve had before. Suddenly, we can start dealing with consequences and look at which levers we can pull in production for things that lie six months into the future. It has really given us an overview, and now we have one single plan instead of eight different plans scattered around. That has helped everyone across the organization.

We’ve just eliminated half of the big coordination meetings where we tried to keep track of everything manually. Now Proficy Scheduler handles that coordination for us, and we don’t need all those meetings anymore. There are huge savings in cutting those meetings, because they were expensive when everyone had to show up,” Stefan explains.