Emerging from a period of court-ordered reorganization in 2019, the company restructured its management at the beginning of 2020 and launched a deep process of change and market recovery. The SARS-CoV-19 pandemic directly affected the notebook and school supplies sector, drastically reducing demand and changing market behavior. For the PPCP department, this translated into more frequent factory scheduling with shorter horizons, demanding greater agility from the team. Sequencing was done in Excel, with several supporting reports and production reporting only for the finished product. The exchange of information with the ERP was slow and deficient, resulting in outdated and non-adherent schedules.

“In the midst of implementing the Credeal APS project, we were facing the most intense point of the entire market crisis. With the new demand pattern (smaller batches), a lower volume of available raw material, and the need to feed our cash flow with greater agility, Preactor came at exactly the right time. In a short period, we were able to gain a broader view of our CCRs and take strategic actions that, together with Preactor, gave us a more efficient delivery. Even with a lower production volume, we achieved significant improvements in setup reduction and, consequently, an increase in productivity.”— Marcos Pedroso, Project Manager at Credeal

Aiming to work with up-to-date data and achieve greater agility and precision in scheduling its factory, Credeal found the solution in Opcenter Preactor Scheduling and the expertise in NEO for the software implementation consulting.

Credeal works with a mix of more than 460 items, distributed across 53 distinct collections. Each product can vary by more than 15 attributes, strongly impacting sequencing. These variables made the day-to-day work of the PCP team complex, leading a team of 3 people to spend 5 hours scheduling the sequencing for each round.

Opcenter Preactor Scheduling was configured so that each resource on the line has different optimization criteria. While Bielomatik's automatic lines aim for setup optimization, on the manual lines the focus is on achieving the best possible synchronization, minimizing as much as possible the lead time of all products in the order book. This flexibility makes it possible to achieve a balancing of resources, a point highly desired by the Credeal team. The sequencing heuristic prioritizes the allocation of bottleneck resources, which perform the final processes on the notebooks.

Through the scheduling reports configured by the NEO team, together with the user-friendly visual of Preactor's scheduling board, the user can easily identify critical points in the sequencing and make timely decisions about when to select alternative production routings.

The fast and agile integration between Preactor and the ERP enabled immediate adoption of the software at Credeal, greatly improving the team's work routine. The scheduling process is now carried out in 1 hour, by just one person. Before the implementation, the company had low adherence between what was planned and what was executed, with difficulty even in measuring it; today adherence stands at more than 95%.

One month after starting to use Preactor, a gain of 159 kg/hour was measured in the production of the finishing resources, about 29% improvement. In the other sectors, the average improvement was 15%. These figures alone made possible an average return of R$ 83,056 per month.

“For a company that intends to grow in the market in which it operates, it is essential to seek modern tools and ways to monitor, control, and analyze the execution of production scheduling — planned versus actual.”— Estêvão Osmarin Rampanelli, PPCP Manager at Credeal

“This is my 4th Preactor implementation project and, so far, it is the project with the most visible quantitative and qualitative gains that I have ever had the honor of being part of.”— Marcos Pedroso, Project Manager at Credeal