Customer Case
As demand for customized goods and services continues to grow, more and more manufacturing companies are adopting a customer-centric business model. Although this approach can create new opportunities from a sales standpoint, it can cause increased production costs and complexity. For manufacturers to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty in today’s demand-driven business environment, they must be able deliver products with a high degree of customization in a short amount of time – and this requires superior supply chain responsiveness and agility.
StarGrup – one of the leading manufacturers of interior and exterior custom glass products for shopping malls, apartment towers, and luxury residences – has built a solid reputation based on its ability to develop and deliver products that meet customers’ individual needs and expectations. Founded in 2005, StarGrup generates around US$90 million in annual gross revenue, and exports nearly half of its products to a network of 15 countries around the world.
Challenges
Interestingly, StarGrup’s chief competitive advantage – its capacity to rapidly produce top quality, highly customized glass products for commercial buildings – is a source of significant strain on its internal supply chain. Each new project that StarGrup undertakes is unique in terms of the physical properties of the products (which vary depending on each customer’s specifications) and the production process itself (as different operations are performed to the surface and edges of glass so that the finished product fulfills the customer’s requirements). Thus, for each new order, a new production route must be defined and specific project requirements (bill of material, engineering drawings, operations, and alternative routes) must be created from scratch.
StarGrup’s production facility in Hadımköy, which has around 350 employees, has to handle orders for approximately 100 new products on a daily basis – a complicated task given the degree of customization required for each order. Adding to this complexity is the fact that StarGrup’s customers typically expect delivery in 7-10 days after their product specifications are set. This puts tremendous pressure on StarGrup’s planners, who must – for every order – quickly make accurate available-to-promise calculations, determine reliable due dates, and try to generate a feasible production plan.
The latter task proved to be practically impossible for StarGrup’s team of four planners, who had to compose and update their production plans manually using spreadsheets – a tedious and time-consuming process which took them each around three hours each day. Overwhelmed by the complexities their customer-centric internal supply chain and the tight time constraints, planners at StarGrup were in need of a solution that would enable the optimization of decision making processes – and for this, they turned to ICRON.
Solution & Results
ICRON devised a three-pronged solution for StarGrup to enable the custom glass manufacturer to optimize its production process and resource utilization.
This new software platform – consisting of ICRON’s Advanced Planning and Scheduling Solution, Capacity Planning Solution, and Data Collection – gives StarGrup’s planners complete visibility and control over real-time shop floor operations and the capability to produce accurate, optimal daily production schedules as well as long-term capacity plans.
Another important component of ICRON’s solution for StarGrup was a Scenario Management Tool, which functions as a visual decision support environment through which planners can generate alternative production plans utilizing different machine loads and shifts to avoid bottlenecks.
Overall, the implementation of ICRON’s solution greatly improved the flexibility and efficiency of StarGrup’s production process, enabling the manufacturing firm to fulfill its promise to customers to deliver premium, customized glass products, on time. Operationally and financially, ICRON’s Optimized Decision Making solution has yielded tremendously positive results for StarGrup including:
- 200% increase in net profit.
- 60% increase in sales.
- 40% increase in on-time delivery.
- 80% decrease in production planning time.
- 10% decrease in raw material safety stock.
- 30% decrease in safety WIP.
- 70% decrease in overtime.
