Madel

Roadmap to Industry 4.0:

Planning & Scheduling in the personal & home care industry

Challenge

Implementation of a new software for production planning & scheduling

Company

Established in 1977 Madel Spa, is a leading Italian manufacturing company specialized in products for home & personal care.

Madel’s mission is the capability to create high-quality and environmentally sustainable products. The company vision can be summarized as follows:  to provide innovative and valuable products to consumers,  to make daily life easier while being respectful of our environment.

Madel manufactures and distributes more than 300 finished products, to meet the most diverse commercial requirements of its partners and

the various  needs of  end consumers  around the world .

The company is focused on three main business areas:  detergents and laundry  additives, home care cleaners and beauty care products.

A longtime and valued partner to Italian most important distribution chains, Madel can count on a pervasive diffusion on the domestic market.  The company is also expanding  in the foreign countries, where  it sells more than 10% out of its total revenue  and is developing  a sales strategy to further expand its  future presence,  through its subsidiaries Madel CZ and Madel International

Context

Prior to implementing COMPASS, the planning and scheduling process was  supported by the ERP software SAGE X3 and by the extensive use of Excel  spreadsheets, but  the situation had been considered far from ideal  for a long time. Finally, in 2015, the  company  acknowledged it could no longer postpone the implementation of a  planning  & scheduling application.  Company growth had made inevitable the replacement of the spreadsheets, which had become time consuming and inaccurate in result. “The  implementation of an integrated planning and scheduling software had become a mandatory step, at least to upgrade the current off-line tools”  says Guido Zanoni, MADEL IT Manager “Another objective of the project was to improve functional integration within the company, making the planning decisions more transparent and shared within the organization.”

The improvements expected  by the company can be summarized below :

  • Finished product stock reduction, without compromising service level performance;
  • Increased flexibility of the planning cycle and improvement of response capacity required to face the market demand volatility;
  • Increased productivity of resources, (reducing thenumber of changeovers and total improductive time);

Improvement  in  on-time delivery and total lead time indicators

Solution

MADEL’s planning model is based on a Make To Stock approach, which is typical in the consumer product maket.

As a result of the project, COMPASS software, integrated with the ERP SAGE X3…

  • … provides the Master Production Plan for every finished products; the output of the process  are the planned orders
  • … which are finite capacity scheduled (with released orders) to generate an optimized packaging schedule, under the constraints of lines capacity, team shift  availability, materials availability and logistics capacity
  • the feasible schedule is then input to determine and synchronize bulk requirements to be produced and bottle call-offs which are automatically sent to the supplier…
  • …. and to issue purchase “spot” orders for all the other raw materials

Benefits

Soon after  COMPASS  go-live we have achieved real benefits:  the planners are able to run simulations and rapidly evaluate alternative scenarios to respond to unexpected  fluctuations  of market demand . The Dynamic Sequencing function has led to optimize set-up and increase productivity in the short-term. The Master Production Schedule has improved visibility in the mid-to-long term and has allowed to automatically adjust inventory levels of finished products accordingly  to market seasonality and marketing promotions.” reports Guido Zanoni

  • stock reduction of finished product with the same on-time delivery level
  • productivity increase (reduction of number of changeovers and overall set-up time)
  • increase in Planning cycle frequency
  • improved capability to address market fluctuations
Contact Plannet