“I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.” (John Cage)
The significant effort in streamlining the production processes and reducing waste led us to identify what is needed and what is considered as the main inspirer of the lean philosophy we endorse: value.
This way we generated value flows, namely lean, effective and efficient activities consistent with the requirements and standards supplied by our customers. The workflow can in this sense be defined by the customer as a pull logic, and therefore respectful for the speed and quality requested, extending it all to our suppliers’ Supply chain management (SCM).
Concepts such as those related to the 5S methodology (Sort, Set In order, Shine, Standardize and Sustain), Just in time (JIT) production and the use of Kanban (a lean manufacturing technique) have been introduced and applied with the main goal of reducing overproduction which represents a waste which greatly affects the performance of a production system.
It can all be enclosed in the term kaizen which is composed of two Japanese words, KAI (change, improvement) and ZEN (good, better), and means to change for the better, continual improvement.
In recent years, the company has implemented a real digital revolution, a project to sustain man’s work through artificial intelligence systems capable of supplying all of the data necessary to plan and improve in innovation and competitiveness.
Tools have been inserted to schedule the activities of the different company areas as well as to manage suppliers so as to guarantee the ever more customised requests of our customers and to give them a reliable and precise answer.
These include: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) which incorporates the material needs planning systems, such as Material Requirement Planning (MRP and MRP II) systems to manage and define production and the load of the production departments. All of this is controlled by a production scheduling software, of finite and infinite capacity resources.
The entire production is also monitored in real time by Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) to gather all of the data essential to verify the productivity of the systems, the state of progress of the “job orders” Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and then the crossing of the orders to create a continual flow to our shipping warehouse, defined by daily withdrawals of the customer in Milk Run systems.
We work on a customer’s drawings and specifications. Our Technical Department, linked to web integration application platforms, through the sharing of our Customers’ Databases, is capable of receiving in real-time technical drawings, complex 3D models, revisions, purchase orders, delivery reports, advance production delivery and synchronisation requests.
This lets us speed up our production start-up times as well as the materials and production purchasing lead times. This incoming information is then sent to all the various production coordination levels or directly to the machine tools via Ethernet or wireless networks.
Our concept is that of a lean, flexible, reactive and effective company, capable of offering a product and a service which meets the customer’s requirements as quickly as possible and at a competitive price.
