Plenty finds room for improvement by Planning with Preactor

The Plenty Group of companies is an established engineering concern with over 200 years of manufacturing experience. With 300 employees and a turnover of ?25 million, the group comprises 5 distinct operating centres that supply to process industries including oil and gas, water and sewerage and food processing.

Four of these are product oriented business units - Top Entry Mixers, Side Entry Mixers, Pumps, and Filters ' while the fifth is a manufacturing centre that supplies manufactured parts and assemblies to the others. This latter company has to cater for product scaling from one inch filters through to agitators measuring twenty metres long, five metres wide and weighing in excess of 20 tonnes. With a potential product range measured in hundreds, batch sizes varying from 1 to upwards of 10, and lead times being measured in months and often extending beyond a year, Plenty Manufacturing has significant scheduling needs. These needs are somewhat uniquely now being met by Preactor International.

Arthur Densley, Materials Manager for the whole site, explains how the company functioned at the time of his arrival in 1988. "In essence there were no automated manufacturing systems, no routing systems, not even any computer based paper systems. Everything was done by hand and either photocopied or duplicated by spirit duplicated banders." Even after the first step was taken and the automated routing system was written in house, significant problems remained. The production manager would have to physically work through every photocopied parts list for every order submitted from every other business unit. Items identified as existing stock were passed to stock control. Non existing stock items were further identified as parts to order or parts to manufacture and actioned accordingly. Attempts to monitor current manufacturing status, and therefore WIP, lay in manually collecting all works order cards and updating them, and consequently updating each batch. As Arthur says, "Even with a photographic memory, any understanding of current WIP would always be at least a week out of date!"

There were other specific problems unique to Plenty Manufacturing. Arthur continues, "We were always having to try and serve four masters. Five if you include the subcontract customers we had begun to supply to". Secondly, the very process by which project progress throughout the plant is monitored is inherently problematic. At each weekly production meeting a view is taken on the 'priority' of each project based on meeting the required delivery dates. This is very subjective and tends to be based on how close the project is to the delivery date and not on the availability of resources to complete the work. Additionally, potential bottlenecks had already been identified concerning the CNC machines, despite having 16 pieces of plant. Furthermore, when dealing with projects in excess of 40 weeks, there was a tendency for activity to be slow in the first weeks leading to a much greater need for resources in the closing weeks. A genuine understanding of their problems led Plenty to conclude that it needed no ordinary product or materials scheduler. What it needed was a Project or Resource scheduler that would handle the entire plant and allow them to monitor realtime WIP within the plant.

Having identified the key problems, Plenty set out to specify the specific core components that their solution would need to comprise. Firstly, Plenty wanted to put, "some more science into scheduling", in other words to develop a more proactive and less re-active approach concerning the need for, and means by which accurate WIP is generated. This in essence meant being able to generate a Master Company Schedule built up from individual company schedules identified in the weekly Invoice/Production meetings. At this time, schedules were only produced if required, and typically only updated when the client next needed to see it! Secondly, this necessitated the need to also generate more customer-focussed schedules that would identify slippage when it first began as opposed to when it happened to be updated. Thirdly, each activity on every job would require a Parts To Activity (PTA) date, the date by which all components must be available for assembly. This would allow all operations for each workstation to be broken down for analysis thereby effectively generating what could be termed a Bill of Resources, as opposed to a Bill of Materials. The combination of these would allow a reverse schedule to be generated for each job whereby each resource required could be identified and scheduled back from the desired completion date. This PTA date would then allow the cross-flow of information between the scheduling system and the purchasing system, further improving the company's ability to maximise fulfilment of works orders.

At this time Plenty was approached by Steve Newman and Shaihan Rahimifard from the University of Loughboro Advanced Manufacturing Technology Centre with regards to using Preactor in the traditional materials scheduling way. Initial scepticism by Plenty concerning Preactor's ability to handle time based scheduling was soon dismissed as Preactor had been used in complex, project based applications in the past. They agreed to begin work together in mid 1997 under the TIMESHARE project, a European Collaborative development project working on team-based, multi-media, software tools for sharing data across manufacturing companies which was being led by Preactor International. As part of this Plenty became a test-bed site for the TIMESHARE deliverables and to assist them with this Plenty used Stan Jonik of the Preactor Solution Provider, SFJ Systems. Stan was able to configure Preactor for the Plenty application including the development of the complex rules they required to optimize their throughput.Currently, the Preactor solution is ninety per cent complete and running in a pilot stage, with an imminent go live date already set. Even in this pilot mode, Preactor has already begun to deliver benefits including scheduling more accurately time against jobs. A number of other benefits are expected to quickly come on stream once the system goes live. Firstly, the Master Schedule produced by Preactor will give visibility for all departments in the timing required for their part in the completion of the project. This will cover not just the next three months as required, but also well into the future in order to ensure that early action, where required, is properly scheduled. Furthermore, the drawing office will no longer prioritise work based on the completion date of a project but on the 'complete by date' generated by Preactor. Consequently procurement will no longer be based on a subjective expected need but on the real needs of the project, thus resulting in lower inventory levels and fewer project delays due caused by late deliveries.

And the future? Plenty is very optimistic of additional benefits that the continuation of TIMESHARE with Preactor will deliver. As Arthur says, "We envisage 3 key paybacks in the next eighteen months. Number one will be real time plant monitoring, in other words, "where is everything in the plant?" This should be ready by the end of 2000. Number two will be real time job progress, in other words, "where is the job against the schedule?" This should be established across the entire plant by mid 2001. Finally, the presentation and availability of information both internally and for the customer will be substantially improved."

Mike Novels, MD of Preactor concludes, "This installation has enabled us to better understand the needs of project based manufacturing environments such as Plenty and to develop real-time tracking and monitoring capabilities that is more and more a requirement of our users. Loughboro AMT were able to identify the priorities early and SFJ systems have done an excellent job in system implementation".