P
lanning Success story
Preactor injects production planning and accuracy into Tex Industrial Plastics
E
stablished in 1977 with the original name of AK precision mouldings, Tex Industrial Plastics is a leading UK based trade injection moulding company that
delivers solutions to approximately 55 different customers across a wide range of market sectors; including water heating, washroom products, fire safety, industrial and automotive.
The £10 million turnover company’s core business is converting a wide range of commodity and engineering polymer into plastic injection mouldings. Orders range in size from a couple of hundred to hundreds of thousands, and these are assessed and compared against a rough capacity plan to check to see if they can be produced within the required timescale. Once an order is accepted a provisional Works Order is generated by the company’s UNIX system and capacity is soft-allocated. As the production date draws nearer this is then
hard-allocated on the plan. Capacity
management issues
The actual production process appears relatively straightforward with raw materials being injected into the required mould then subjected to any secondary value-add operations before being
“
Mouldings on a conveyor at Tex Industrial Plastics.
We now had the flexibility and agility to respond to short-term changes in demand as well as any issues with a given resource.”
– Guy Sentance, Tex Industrial Plastics. Production in progress
packaged and dispatched to the customer. “Next, we have to determine which orders require which presses,” explained Tex Industrial Plastics production director Guy Sentance, “and given the fact that certain orders require specific presses, this again adds to our capacity management issues.” Overall, Tex has 38 presses ranging from 22 tonnes to 1000 tonnes
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MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS
IT July 2011
with these split into 2 moulding areas. The company also offers numerous added value operations to ensure that its customers receive the most sustainable cost effective solution. Highly sequence dependent, these operations are all potential capacity constraints – as is the company’s human resource. Sentance again: “It is very easy to have peaks and troughs of demand for workers and we only have a fixed amount of permanent labour we can use.”
Prior to Preactor, Tex sought to overcome all of the above challenges by a combination of its UNIX system and a manual magnetic planning board. The result was that it was simply impossible to keep on top of all the products, all the orders, the raw materials, and even the plan, because the planner had to continually cross reference 3-4 data sources. In addition, the lack of visibility of accurate data impacted the Customer Service team’s ability to give accurate due dates in the first place and also provided no forewarning of orders with problems until they happened.
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