Reducing scheduling time from four hours to 40 minutes a week and doubling the fixed time horizon from two weeks to four

Leading the development of animal health medicines and supplies

In 1994 in Louveira, São Paulo, Brazil, veterinarian Dr. João Carlos Ribeiro founded Ventil aiming to develop quality veterinary products in Brazil at market-compatible prices. It began its activities in nutrition for horses, but later spread to other areas of the pet market. Today, it is a leader for developing medicines and supplements for animal health, well-being and performance.

With over two decades of history, the complete Vetnil product line includes over 90 high-tech products. additionally, the company has expanded its operations beyond its borders, exporting products to over 16 countries. To continue developing and producing solutions, Vetnil needed to overcome production planning and scheduling challenges. For this, the company teamed up with NEO Digital Industries (NEO), a Siemens Digital Industries Software expert partner, and used Opcenter™ Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) software. Opcenter is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

Overcoming production scheduling challenges

Although using Opcenter APS software is a beneficial solution for optimizing the production and supply of materials, its application in the pharmaceutical sector brings specific challenges. For example, challenges related to its complex and regulated nature, which is the case for Vetnil by the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Food Supply (MAPA).

To manage perishable inputs and ensure batch traceability, companies must synchronize every operation throughout the production process.

Effective control of work-in-process (WIP) inventory requires continuous monitoring across the entire production chain to ensure consistent production flow and safeguard finished product quality. Additionally, some of the raw materials used by Vetnil are subject to strict regulation by the National Army due to their sensitive nature. Vetnil also faced major challenges in production planning, scheduling and control. This was due to having a completely manual sequencing process that limited visibility of the shop floor schedule, making it difficult to accurately promise delivery times. As a result, only the shop floor controlled the production process constraints, limiting the production planning and scheduling team’s ability to perform more detailed analyses of the schedule. Employees on the shop floor only made notes on the finished product, making it impossible to accurately update the schedule or monitor schedule adherence.

Choosing Opcenter to improve scheduling and planning

When searching for a way to achieve continuous improvement of its processes and reach Industry 4.0, Vetnil took another step toward digitalization by partnering with NEO and integrating Opcenter APS.

The Opcenter APS software fully integrates with Vetnil’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, receiving all the data necessary to generate the production schedule.

Thus, minutes after data integration, the company can view the production schedule, consider all scheduled production orders and optimize setups and priorities for new demands, according to the rules Vetnil defined.

The solution NEO developed enabled the company to generate several production scenarios per day or on demand, differentiating production orders to serve the domestic market from export orders. This allowed Vetnil to prioritize demands according to its business strategy. Additionally, using Opcenter APS centralized setup times for product changeovers, which the company previously treated as empirical information, generating more reliable simulations and factory execution monitoring.

After implementing Opcenter APS, the company could create specific business rules for its sequencing scenario, which carried out prioritizing sequential batch order and grouping via programming. Given the need for strict control of product handling and packaging operations while considering several restrictions, such as the limited use of the handling room as a production resource, NEO configured Opcenter APS to optimize using these restrictions, enabling more precise scheduling.

Benefiting from an efficient APS system

For product weighing operations, leveraging Opcenter APS allowed Vetnil to group the weighing of all batches from the same production campaign; thus, balancing the use of rooms and weighing scales and minimizing total processing times.

For outsourced operations, the solution integrated third-party processes directly into the overall production schedule, incorporating agreed supplier lead times and synchronizing them with internal operations. This provided full visibility across the production process, improved coordination with external partners and enabled more effective monitoring of third-party capacity and delivery deadlines.

Some of the more complex challenges from Vetnil manually scheduling production included the minimum waiting time to start the next operation for some manufactured products and processing incremental bottle sizes in the liquid bottling process.

With Opcenter APS, the company could configure minimum waiting times before the next operation and consider every stage’s time to form the total lead time, ensuring the correct sequencing of products. For the liquid bottling process, NEO created a business rule for processing various bottle sizes incrementally, from smallest to largest or vice versa, optimizing the line’s gradual setup time.

To handle items that a given resource are processing while the coding operation occurs simultaneously, NEO developed a business rule that does not require preparing the formula in the weighing and handling operations. Thus, the packaging coding operation can start, and these operations can occur in parallel.

According to André Resende, planning manager, the team currently uses all reports from NEO’s standard reporting package, highlighting mainly the material analysis and schedule adherence reports, which Vetnil previously could not measure or control. This also includes the schedule by resource report, which the company could make available in another software application and publish on the internet for all stakeholders.

Realizing additional benefits beyond automating production scheduling

Implementing Opcenter APS at Vetnil brought benefits that went beyond automating production scheduling. With Opcenter, the company could study the need to increase the number of recording stations, expanding their implementation to weighing and handling operations, increasing their frequency. Thus, Vetnil no longer only records data on the finished product, enabling more constant schedule updates with better adherence.

Further, the production schedule, which previously considered only the current week and the following week, now accounts for a firm sequencing horizon twice as large. This increases delivery date adherence for the sales team, product in-stock availability and customer satisfaction.

“After implementing Opcenter APS, we now have an overview of the two factories in real time,” says Resende. “We can monitor the status of each production and alert the production supervisor about delays. Using Opcenter APS reports has facilitated communication between the involved departments. Today, there is no longer a need to exchange emails to update information, as everyone has access to updated reports online.”

Reducing scheduling time and improving adherence

The time the planning and scheduling team spent on production scheduling has also been significantly impacted by using Opcenter APS. Previously, the team spent over four hours per week generating the schedule, and now this activity requires 40 minutes per week. Additionally, the operations director was responsible for production scheduling; however, by implementing a complete and reliable solution that considers all fundamental constraints, it is now the scheduling team’s responsibility.

Via the resource scheduling report, all areas of Vetnil have a real-time view of the schedule, without the need to send spreadsheets by email. This facilitates internal communication between areas and creates a more assertive decision-making process.

Since the Vetnil solution considers the lack of inputs and pending purchase orders, it does not allocate production orders before necessary materials arrive. This eliminates production stoppages due to lack of raw materials, ensuring continuous production and reducing inefficiencies.

Further, implementing Opcenter APS was accompanied by a time-analysis study of all Vetnil operations. The company’s ERP and Opcenter APS databases measured processing times and registered setup times, allowing it to calculate each product’s real-world production time per batch. This improved scheduling adherence and provided a more reliable and detailed view of production times.

Gaining real-time visibility, reducing costs and improving communication

Integrating Opcenter APS brought numerous gains and benefits to Vetnil. This includes advanced production scheduling agility, enhanced real-time production visibility, reduced costs, improved communication between areas, eliminated stoppages due to lack of materials and increased adherence to the schedule.

“Before using Opcenter, weekly programming used to take hours to complete, but today we can do it in minutes,” says Resende. “But after integrating Opcenter, we have already managed to double the fixed time horizon, which previously took two weeks and is now four weeks, with the possibility of increasing it even further. Rescheduling has become easy, and today it is done quickly. Opcenter is undoubtedly a solution that will help us a lot in the coming years.”