Article disponible en langue anglaise uniquement. Reaping the Benefits of Production Scheduling The Challenge Cascades Inc. is a leader in the manufacturing of packaging products, tissue paper and specialized fine papers. Internationally, Cascades employs more than 14,000 people and operates close to 160 modern and versatile operating facilities located in North America and Europe. Cascades Enviropac, one of the most innovative and fast-growing division of the company, designs its packaging using honeycomb made entirely from recycled material. Like most world-class businesses, Enviropac faces rising demand for increasingly diverse products and has to meet ever-tighter requirements in terms of delivery lead-time and availability of finished product. One of Cascades Enviropac's strengths is its unique custom packaging design and development service. The specific geometry of its cells gives honeycomb, weight for weight, the highest compression strength of any packaging material currently on the market. As well, it can be used with products of all shapes, and offers an eco-friendly, and 100% recycling alternative to traditional packaging materials. Enviropac works with the customer to determine the packaging requirements and expected shipping conditions. From window block, to universal cushioned-corner, pallets, separators, or protective u-channel, the number of applications is endless. In the last three years, Enviropac has developed dozens of new products. The operational planning team at Enviropac is responsible for forecasting production capacity and workforce requirements over the long term and for making the detailed short-term schedule for each work station of the 4 production stages. The team carries out its activities in a very dynamic environment. Since each order is customized to fit the specific requirements of the client, the production order has no predefined routing and bill of materials. Each order visits an average of 6 work stations and the product may require multi-passes operations. The production system also supports production overlapping, grouping of orders, order splitting, and curing time between some operations. The department?s most important task is to schedule orders over the next four weeks, a task that involves coordinating thousands of operations. As well, because of the many changes and unforeseen events, the production schedules often have to be completely revised. Before the installation of Syncrun, Enviropac used typical scheduling tools, i.e., an ERP system combined with in-house electronic spreadsheet applications. With its volume of production more than doubling over the last three years, these tools had soon become a hindrance to company growth and diversification. Production scenarios couldn?t be analyzed in a reasonable length of time. Control had been lost over machine setup costs. Scheduling was suboptimal. Managers were in a reactive rather than proactive mode. The challenge was to make the manufacturer more flexible and agile in operations scheduling and thus better able to respond quickly to customer needs?at a fraction of the cost of the old production system. The Solution: SYNCRUN The time had come for advanced planning and scheduling technology. Such a technology would have to coordinate all of the manufacturing departments, bring the planning and marketing people together and, above all, quickly generate solutions that would minimize production costs. In addition, the solution had to:

• synchronize all activities for each order so as to cut the time it spent going through the plant;
• optimize plant throughput;
• level capacity usage over time;
• synchronizes production orders in line with the capacity constraints of different resources: employees, machines, tooling, and raw materials;
• reduce global production changeover time;
• schedule operations in a just-in-time mode;
• adjust to feedback from the shop floor in real time;
• measure how the production system will be affected by last-minute changes to the delivery dates, the amounts produced, or the priorities given to different orders. Provide a detailed analysis of the effect of changes to each order?s production costs and delivery date;
• make it possible to rapidly analyze different resource-related scenarios, like machine shutdown or maintenance, and variations on the availability of operators.

Syncrun, an Advanced Planning and Scheduling solution developed by Arima inc. was chosen for its ease of use, its ability to adapt to the manufacturer?s operations, and the company?s 12-year experience in the packaging industry. The Results By installing Syncrun, Enviropac reaped the following benefits: Reduction in Changeover Time and Raw Material Waste The optimization algorithms built into the scheduling system analyze a vast range of possibilities to find those manufacturing sequences that will reduce machine set-up time. At Enviropac, changeovers accounts for an important percentage of machine usage, since each production order is customized. Installation of the software brought a 10% average decrease in set-up time for all machines. This meant more production with the same capacity and a 2% decrease in raw material waste. Increased Visibility on Production With the help of Syncrun, Enviropac's planning team is now able to get a precise long-term machine capacity and workforce requirements profile. Syncrun enables to foresee trouble and solve problems days or weeks before they actually affect production. For instance, it will identify any production bottleneck and redirect some orders to alternate resources. Tactical and Strategic Analysis Before installing Syncrun, the analysis of scenarios was virtually impossible due to the complexity of the scheduling puzzle. Now, Enviropac is able to work on a copy of the production schedule to make actual changes to it or simulate different scenarios, e.g., scheduling an imaginary order, changing a shipment date, moving an order up or down in the sequence, shutting down a machine, adding overtime, change resource efficiency rate, etc. The scheduler can assess the overall impact of a local change and quantitatively compare the different possible alternatives. The effects may be displayed on a Gantt chart or tabulated in printed reports. The scheduler may rapidly assess how changes will affect setup time, shipments ahead of schedule or behind schedule, and production costs. Inventory Reduction Better synchronizing also means better timing of orders. By planning and scheduling in a just-in-time mode, Syncrun allowed a 20% reduction in product stocking time which translates into a significant inventory carrying cost reduction. Increase in the Quality of Customer Service The system's approach to scheduling is conducive to better management of priorities and deliveries. Although the company didn't precisely measure the increase in on-time delivery, a definite improvement was observed. Customer service representatives were also able to provide customers with faster and more precise answers about the progress and routing of orders at the plant. Real-time Information The system offers complete hands-on interfacing with Enviropac's existing information system. It can read in data from the client's system through data exchange gateways, so there's no duplication and no need to enter data separately. Syncrun feeds processed scheduling data back into the existing ERP/MRP system. This functionality allows a complete integration of both systems and a real-time access to information for all relevant applications. Conclusion Many business managers wrongly think that the operations scheduling process cannot be automated when production is always changing and subject to many interacting constraints. Crisis management often becomes the rule and carrying out the original schedule becomes the exception. Actually, this kind of operation can benefit a lot from the latest advances in information technology, especially in production scheduling software. With these new IT tools, a manufacturing manager can get the upper hand in an operations environment that may seem uncontrollable. In the face of growing sales volume and increasingly stiff competition, the senior managers at Enviropac decided that Arima offered the most viable and effective solution. After only 6 months of use, the benefits have proven them right. "Syncrun offers unequalled possibilities for resource optimization and scenario analysis. With this advanced decision support tool, we have been able to take full control over our growing operations and make our scheduling a real competitive advantage." - Pascal Labrie, Plant Manager, Cascades, Enviropac Division