Increasing overall service level by 81 percent, improving productivity by 9 percent and enhancing deadline reliability

Innovating the ceramic coatings industry

Founded in 1952 in Campo Largo, Paraná, Brazil, Incepa started manufacturing ceramic floor tiles and eventually sanitary ware. After additional acquisitions and technological advancements, the company became part of the Lamosa Group, which is the second largest manufacturer of ceramic coatings. Incepa focuses on global manufacturing and commercializing ceramic coatings and adhesives.

To continue offering innovative ceramic coating solutions, Incepa needed to overcome production challenges. Thus, the company teamed up with NEO Digital Industries (NEO), a Siemens Digital Industries Software expert partner, and used Opcenter™ software. Opcenter is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

Improving international distribution processes

Although ceramic production is an ancient activity, the entire process is now automated, from mixing the liquid mass (slurry) to packaging and palletizing. Due to this automation, one of Incepa’s main challenges is balancing production centers.

Additionally, having the flexibility to absorb changes in demand while maintaining customer service levels and productivity in production centers are critical objectives for the company.

The production process begins with grinding and atomizing raw materials to form the granular mass. Before pressing, the planning system minimizes stock keeping units (SKUs) and aligns production with the coating line’s pull schedule. The prepared powder mass is then fed into the press, where it’s heavily compressed until the tile achieves the necessary green body rigidity and density. After pressing, the pieces undergo an enameling process to acquire the desired colors and/or designs. The pieces then go to the ovens for the firing stage, becoming rigid and almost finished.

Some pieces go through the polishing process, using abrasives to give a more refined finish. There is also a grinding machine, which adjusts the edges of the ceramic pieces to be perpendicular, resulting in a more precise finish. In this scenario, the biggest restriction on production was the kilns. They determine the pace of production, from pulling the glazed ceramics to pushing the subsequent polishing and grinding processes. Depending on the product mix, this bottleneck can vary from location to location. Therefore, it is critical to synchronize all processes.

Additionally, Incepa was experiencing a period of extremely high demand from the domestic and international markets. Its main client is Roca Group’s division in the United States (U.S.), which is a part of the Lamosa Group. This includes Roca’s five distribution centers in the U.S. and its highly complex service due to the diversity of products and geographic scope. There was a need to improve this international distribution process between the U.S. centers to connect the demands with production in Brazil and quickly gain capacity to meet this peak in demand.

This was difficult, thus, after evaluating market options, Incepa chose to use Opcenter software implemented by NEO, due to its prior knowledge in the sector.

Enhancing distribution and demand planning

The Opcenter Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) solution NEO developed for Incepa was composed of three products/modules and eight key scopes.

The first distribution module performs not only distribution planning, but also demand planning, forecasting based on multiple statistical methods and choosing the one with the lowest error. The company can manage this demand in several ways, including outlier treatment, sales team collaboration, equivalent material evaluation for new products and product segmentation to identify critical items. The solution defines inventory policies for each type of product based on its volume and frequency of sales.

After identifying and processing the needs of each U.S. DC, Incepa used a centralized algorithm that generates purchase orders for the Brazilian factories and transfers between the U.S. DCs to better serve each distribution zone. This distribution considers ongoing transportation, stocks and available physical space in each DC as a limiting factor, in addition to fair share policies that define services in case of restrictive stocks.

For demands from the U.S. and other Brazilian channels, Incepa uses the production module to initially define inventory policies for Brazil. In the U.S., the solution prioritizes producing products with the highest frequency and sales volume, in addition to assessing the current inventory level.

In this process, Incepa uses finite production capacity analysis to allocate products to the ovens and project weekly production, weighing several indicators to find the best result at that time. After defining the ideal production mix for each week, Opcenter connects with Incepa’s ERP and generates the orders for various product structure levels necessary for carrying out the planned production.

The system sends orders from Opcenter for creation in the ERP, which it can import into the latest APS solution. The goal is to sequence production orders to avoid setups involving format, relief type, surface type and other mapped attribute changes. Additionally, Incepa can use the raw material purchase requisition feature, which, based on planned production dates, sends purchase requisitions to the supply area, taking into account parameters such as minimum batch, multiple batch and safety stock. With this solution, Incepa can more clearly visualize production resource use and optimize production, reducing setups, improving efficiency and reducing costs.

The entire implementation, considering the solutions in Brazil and the U.S., took approximately one year to implement, meeting Incepa’s needs.

Enhancing productivity, service and deadline reliability

After implementing Opcenter, Incepa achieved significant results. The company saw a 9 percent increase in productivity at one of its factories, as well as an 81 percent increase in the overall level of service.

Additionally, the solution brought other benefits, such as increased reliability of the deadlines reported to the sales department, reduced effort in time spent scheduling and planning, changed the focus from mechanical activities to analytical activities, enhanced preparation for variations in demand and standardized production orders with greater precision in costs.

With several other improvements planned for future implementations, Opcenter continues meeting Incepa‘s needs. In the future, the company aims to increase the solution’s integration. Additionally, the company hopes to generate a statistical forecast to complement demand planning and sales and operations planning (S&OP) and purchase requisitions automatically for Brazilian production. For all these objectives, Incepa relies on full consultancy and technical support from NEO.