P

lanning Success story

International Greetings

celebrates 12 years of growth and evolution with Preactor

I

nternational Greetings plc is one of the world’s leading designers, manufacturers, importers and distributors of gift-wrap, stationery, gift bags, crackers, greeting cards and accessories. The £70 million-

turnover company has its 2 printing and manufacturing sites in the UK, with 70 per cent of all products designed and manufactured to order for global brands such as Ikea, Costco and Tesco. The remaining 30 per cent being standard lines are distributed by wholesalers and garden centres etc. Juggling 10,000 orders a year with values ranging between £2000 and £10,000,000 where delivery date is mission critical requires a planning & scheduling solution that is completely dependable.

Christmas for International Greetings starts anywhere between 6 and 14 months before the Christmas its finished goods are intended for. A considerable amount of time is spent in the specification, design and approval stage before an approved product can be then confirmed as ready for production. This is essentially a 2-stage process that begins with printing the required pattern on the appropriate stock and then cutting to size before packing and dispatch. “If you miss a customer delivery, you’ve lost the business and on the rare occasions this isn’t the case, there’s invariably a substantial financial penalty incurred,” commented technical director Mike Harris, who has been with the company for 12 years.

Accurate timing and visibility

With single orders of wrapping paper that can be measured in tens of millions of metres, the sheer volume and size of goods produced impact every stage of the manufacturing process. According to Harris, the speed at which some of the converting machines (the cutting and rolling stage) operate means the company could physically fill up the converting premises in less than one day – which would mean having no room to keep on working. Accurate timing and visibility of incoming paper and card stock from suppliers, the delivery of the printed product to the cutting and finishing area product and the swift despatch of the finished goods are all vital, as is the smooth flow of orders through the company’s range of different printing, cutting and packing machinery.

Rolls of printed paper being loaded on to a converting machine.

The primary critical component is the cardboard core, manufactured on site as fast

28

MANUFACTURING

&LOGISTICS

IT May 2010

Mike Harris: “If you miss a customer

delivery, you’ve lost the business and on the rare occasions this isn’t the case,

there’s invariably a substantial financial penalty incurred.”

as possible. “If we run out of core we can’t produce anything,” explained Harris. Additional constraints include many products having set up times that may be many times longer than actual production times and certain products requiring specific machines and routings while others can have a variety of potential combinations of machines and routings. With each SKU containing up to 4 or 5 different individual jobs, all of these must be available together in order for the order to be shipped on time and in full. Also, 85 per cent of the entire annual production has to be despatched in just 4 months.

Evolution

For the past 12 years, the company has been using Preactor’s production planning & scheduling technology to overcome >>

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