Improving warehouse and production management
In 1995, four engineers, all versed in the elevator business, decided it was time to shake things up. Intent on creating smart, modern, economic lifts for homes and businesses, the four friends founded Aritco Lift AB (Aritco)-a company destined to take the elevator industry to the next level. Having since grown into a flourishing business, Aritco's operations now occur in a 16,000 sqm factory in Stockholm, producing 4,000 elevators a year, which make their way into 40 different countries.
Having won several awards for their offerings, the team at Aritco realized they needed to overhaul their manufacturing processes. Much like the industry they had endeavored to shake up, how they manufactured, packaged, and shipped out their product was in need of an overhaul. With an understanding that implementing an MOM (Manufacturing Operations Management) platform was the best path forward, the Aritco team reached out to Parsec Partner, Plantvision, who subsequently recommended and implemented TrakSYS.
- "After the go-live of TrakSYS, we have seen improvements in several processes - such as warehouse management and order processing. While it is too early to verify our project KPIs for Incorrect Pick since the lead times from shipped delivery to customer can be several months, we have already seen less reported incorrect pick in-house which is a huge improvement! We also see that we have much better visibility of material shortages in-house and improved productivity, especially for spare part order assembly and picking."
Jonas Sjödahl, Chief Operating Officer & Deputy CEO, Aritco
Goals
A key objective of the project was to increase on-time and in-full orders to 98%. This meant increasing order accuracy and ensuring all appropriate parts and components were included in each finished package.
Another goal was to optimize inventory management along with stock-take processes, including cycle counting and deviation reduction by 50%.
There was also a focus on improving production processes with the goal of optimizing the quality of finished goods to reduce scrap and rework. Additionally, morning meeting whiteboards and paper were to be replaced by TrakSYS dashboards and reports.
Challenges
At the start of the project, Aritco was faced with challenges in three areas. Firstly, there was a lack of shop floor visibility. This resulted in incomplete orders being sent out, which impacted customer satisfaction and required Aritco to spend more money to ship out the missing components.
Not having a real-time inventory management solution was another major challenge, making it difficult to identify the quantities of in-stock items. Inevitably, this led to production shutdowns when assumed inventory levels did not match actual inventory levels.
Thirdly, there was a lack of insight and visibility into production bottlenecks. This not only impacted performance and limited capacity, but also prevented teams from establishing the root-causes of production delays.
Solution Overview
In conjunction with the Plantvision team, Aritco's production team worked to design and implement a TrakSYS rollout that would help them optimize their warehouse visibility and (by proxy) their production processes.
Whereas their former solution only told operators which materials an order required, TrakSYS provided operators with real-time insight into inventory levels and enabled GMP (good manufacturing practices) like FIFO (first in, first out).
Plantvision implemented TrakSYS for Production Management so teams could monitor every step of the elevator assembly process. All of this was done with the goal of removing production bottlenecks to increase capacity and allow Aritco to operate as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Results
Aritco is already seeing many benefits with the new solution, which now enables data to be combined from disparate data sources. The company has been able to work towards its on-time and in-full production goals, as well as digitizing paper documents for morning meetings.
One area where a clear improvement has already been seen is in the reduction in inventory-related production closures. Here, the introduction of reliable inventory reports has helped to reduce production closures from six days to two days per year.
