World-class manufacturers of food, pharmaceuticals and other critical products place heavy demands on their suppliers. In today's increasingly competitive environment, manufacturers expect vendors to meet often extraordinary quality, production, customization and timing requirements. Suppliers who cannot meet those exacting demands struggle, fail and often disappear.
Those who can meet these requirements emerge as profitable market leaders. That is certainly the case in the highly competitive packaging industry, and for Teich AG, a respected international supplier of innovative, flexible packaging materials. A wholly owned subsidiary of Constantia Flexibles, Austria-based Teich Aktiengesellschaft utilizes aluminum, paper and other prime raw materials to manufacture high-quality packaging for manufacturers in the dairy, confectionery, food, pharmaceutical and pet industries.
To meet the exacting standards of those demanding customers, Teich leverages state-of-the-art systems and procedures to meet ISO 9001:2000, BRC and FDA hygiene certification requirements and its own high quality standards. The company employs 2,000 workers and operates its own aluminum rolling mills to ensure the integrated production of foil supplies for the entire corporate group.
Not long ago, company managers took a hard look at their performance and at the production and control systems they needed to remain competitive. They saw both challenges and opportunities, and, in response, laid out an ambitious plan to upgrade their vital metal-foil output capabilities.
Production challenges
The Teich AG rolling foil mills at Weinburg, Austria, supply its key customers and sister companies with a wide range of packaging-related foils. The production processes are extremely complex and require the individual plants to meet very demanding, and frequently changing, delivery and product-customization requirements. The company's previous-generation systems did not provide the control or flexibility to consistently meet those high expectations.
With those older systems, central order processing was costly and time consuming. Scheduling was largely a manual process, with planning for both material procurement and the production process done primarily on paper. Feedback was slow and error-prone.
Given these fundamental limitations, Teich AG was forced to keep extensive and expensive rolling-foil reserve stocks on hand at all times. Even then, every specialdelivery request presented a significant planning and production challenge.
Integrated approach
To address those shortcomings, Teich AG set out to create a new, vertically integrated rolling-foil production capability. The company's planned 100 percent automatedfoil "Rolling Plant II"represented its largest-ever capital investment, and would integrate advanced planning and manufacturing execution technologies to create a highavailability, real-time supply chain solution. The new rolling-foil facility would incorporate sophisticated management capabilities to manage scheduling and tools, material flow, manufacturing execution and shop-floor activities.
The new facility would allow the package provider to more precisely schedule material batches and items, to plan rolling workload, and to precisely monitor activities against planned windows. Teich AG managers expected this new Rolling Plant II project to deliver:
- Procurement optimization
- Internal and external delivery performance improvement
- Reduced work-in-progress (WIP) and WIP material requirements
- Shorter production lead times
- Faster responses to production opportunities
- Optimized resource utilization through improved material routing and capacity management
- Planning and scheduling synchronization
- Reduced deviations in planning, scheduling, inventory and costs
- Improved visibility and collaboration between planning and production
- Reduced manual-coordination requirements
Expectations at Teich AG
To meet those ambitious objectives, Teich AG called on a long-term technology partner, 4Production. 4Production specializes in the planning and control of the production of metals, paper and other industrial products.
4Production applied its unique knowledge of manufacturing production systems to deliver a solution that integrated its 4P MES production management system with i2 Factory Planner technology. This approach promised a new and higher degree of planning accuracy and flexibility for the new and expanded Teich AG rolling-mill operations. 4Production then implemented the new technology in parallel with ongoing production runs and fully trained Teich AG foremen and shift supervisors on the solution.
"Increasingly, the productivity of rolling-foil mills is a core part of our growth strategy. This way we are able to stay abreast of the increasing demand for our products," says Wolfgang Geyrhofer, process engineer with Teich AG. Geyrhofer says Teich AG selected 4Production based on proven performance in similar implementations, "since the company is very competent and has enormous experience at its disposal from comparable projects within the aluminum industry."
i2 Factory Planner provides intelligent decision support for production planning and scheduling, and is designed to simultaneously manage material and capacity constraints in the development of workable operating plans for plants, departments, work centers and production lines.
Planners and schedulers can utilize Factory Planner to intelligently optimize the performance of a manufacturing facility to reduce lead times, inventory and operating costs while improving throughput and due-date performance. Extensive modeling capabilities allow buyers to more efficiently forecast, purchase and manage key production materials. This field-proven approach allows manufacturers to spot and resolve potential supply chain bottlenecks and to create more precise and timely production reports.
"i2 Factory Planner was selected for this combined solution because of its seamless integration with the 4P MES solution,"says Erwin Bronk, 4Production chief operating officer. "Factory Planner could be implemented quickly, and delivers the accelerated planning and specialized functionality needed in the Teich AG production environment."
Speed and efficiency
The combined solution gives Teich improved flexibility and transparency at all levels of foil production. As part of this solution, 4Production helped Teich redefine and improve manufacturing-related processes, interfaces and responsibilities. This approach now supports optimized planning and production, and allows Teich to respond more quickly and efficiently to late-breaking change requirements. By more fully integrating with key suppliers,Teich AG has also improved its ability to meet critical production schedules.
"These integrated planning and control systems enable maximum transparency within production,"notes Rainer Huber, project manager of the Teich AG's Weinburg rolling mill. "Things are more at ease."
Teich AG reports the following specific improvements from this integrated planning and production solution:
- Real-time, closed-loop production planning, scheduling and execution capabilities
- Automatic-loop, batch-execution adjustments for better scheduling and planning
- Faster internal order quotes
- Reduced production lead-time requirements
- Reduced foil stock and reserve-stock requirements
- Greater stock and production visibility
- Fail-proof system for maximum availability
- Seamless integration between planning and 4P MES system scheduling and execution
- Optimum throughput, lead times and delivery performance for Teich AG's largest-ever new system investment
Those gains now enable Teich AG to meet high customer expectations, and help keep this proven leader at the forefront of the competitive packaging sector.
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— Jon Kemp |
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