Until the end of 2018, the company worked with a partial scheduling process for its production lines. Only bottleneck resources were scheduled, and even for these the time to generate the operations queue was high, taking a week to complete the factory's monthly planning. The lack of agility in scheduling and rescheduling caused recurring delays at the end of each month.

The team, which at the time had 10 people, used spreadsheets to manage day-to-day work: collecting production reporting data, managing production orders and scheduling the lines. Faced with all these challenges, the company turned to NEO Engenharia de Produção to carry out the scheduling project for its plant, using PREACTOR AS from Siemens

Preactor Scheduling was configured to handle scheduling for the edge-banding, drilling, painting, assembly and packaging sectors. For each sector, the various characteristics that make up the product were mapped and configured as setup attributes, including: edge-band tape type, product family, design type and board color.

The solution delivers a feasible production plan, balancing resources and reducing WIP within the factory through synchronization between the various operations, respecting and minimizing the necessary setups and the factory's tooling constraints. With each schedule, Preactor receives production reporting data from the MES and organizes the pending queue on the machines. From this queue, the Preactor user schedules the remaining operations with their respective priorities (normal order, service order, replacement order and rework order).

Given Bartira's need to analyze the factory's production capacity, labor, raw materials and other variables, Preactor also delivers a production simulation solution, in which the company can run a production plan months into the future, for as long as the forecast received extends.

With the plan ready and validated, the user then exports the machines' production queue directly to the ERP and the MES. Once the schedule is released, it is immediately available on the machine terminals so that operators can carry out the schedule for their shift. Through locks on the machine terminals, the operator cannot change the sequence suggested by Preactor without a supervisor's authorization, ensuring that the work done by the PCP team is what is actually carried out on the shop floor.

After implementing Preactor and gaining maturity in its use, the work that the ten-person team could not complete in a week is today fully handled by four people in just 2 hours. The scheduling view is no longer limited to the resources considered bottlenecks and now covers all of the factory's machines, giving the PCP team greater analytical power. On the scheduling of these bottleneck resources alone, adherence between planned and executed was at 60%; 6 months after implementation, scheduling all resources, adherence reached 100%. Production capacity, which was previously 24,000 boxes, rose to more than 26,000, an increase of almost 10% in productivity, with all deliveries ahead of schedule. Part of this efficiency gain is due to data synchronization and another part to improvement work across all sectors.

Finally, data collection, which used to be done from various spreadsheets, is today extracted from the Preactor database in an organized way within a few minutes. Preactor's impact on daily operations brought far greater synchronization between the different processes, leading the client to state:

"Preactor made the processes fully synchronized"

The other team members had their routines shifted to more strategic activities within the company, analyzing data and seeking the best solutions for Bartira.

Fernando Canelas, PCP coordinator, highlighted the importance of Preactor at Bartira:

"The deployment of Preactor AS at Bartira was a milestone in the company's scheduling. Without the synchronization of the stages we would not be at the current delivery level. Every company should implement a production scheduler as soon as possible, eliminating human interference in the scheduling process as much as possible."— Fernando Canelas, PCP coordinator

One year after implementation, Bartira continues to invest in Preactor, seeking new solutions, new reports and new customized scheduling rules