Increasing packaging productivity by 21.2 percent with higher production volume using the same machinery

Investing in continuous R&D

The Packing Group is a leading producer of flexible plastic packaging in Latin America. Founded in 1986 in Valinhos (Sao Paulo), Brazil, it initially focused on valve sacks for fertilizers, plastic tarps and films for agricultural applications. Over the years, the company has expanded its technology and factory network and now produces high-performance packaging and coextruded multilayer films.

It has eight industrial plants in Brazil that produce over 200,000 tons of packaging per year, with exports to the Americas and Europe. It also has a distribution center in Madrid, Spain and commercial offices in Europe and the United States.

Its products serve sectors such as food and beverage, automotive, electronics, textiles, agribusiness and construction. The company continuously invests in research and development (R&D) to ensure the quality and innovation of its packaging solutions, always focusing on reducing environmental impact with sustainable practices and strategic partnerships.

Aligning what is produced and purchased

The challenges faced by the Packing Group’s production planning and control (PPC) were directly tied to the company’s strategies in the flexible plastic packaging sector. They needed to define production locations and dates and balance production capacity with service policies and priority occupancy, which required a meticulous and adaptable organization that could make the most of available resources.

Another critical factor was reducing material inventories and improving cash flow, which relied on a precise alignment between what was produced and what was purchased. This synchronization significantly contributes to operational efficiency and the company’s financial sustainability.

Having the agility to respond to deadline requests from the commercial area is a key factor in the plastic packaging market. It is a dynamic sector, where decisions must be made quickly. Many customers work with short production cycles and maintain minimal inventories, making any delay a direct risk to their operations.

In the case of the Packing Group, this urgency was even more relevant considering that a significant portion of its clients operate in sectors like food, beverage and consumer goods, markets with frequent demand fluctuations that require immediate replenishment to avoid stockouts.

Unlike industries with longer and more stable processes, the flexible packaging sector deals with urgent orders, constant plan revisions and strict delivery requirements. Therefore, ensuring fast responses not only strengthens relationships with customers but is a significant competitive advantage for the company.

Improving operational results

To overcome these challenges and drive results, the Packing Group, which is constantly searching for innovation and operational excellence, analyzed the market for specialized tools in production planning and scheduling. The choice of Opcenter™ APS software marked the beginning of a solid partnership with Lean Scheduling Brazil (LSB), which played a strategic role in jointly building a tailored solution aligned with the company’s goals while focusing on improving operational results.

“We significantly raised the quality of the planning, ensuring an exceptional level of accuracy and providing even faster and more precise service to our customers,” says Carlos Pistarini, supply chain director of the Packing Group.

The implementation was planned in phases, starting with the Packduque unit in Valinhos – the first of the group to adopt Opcenter APS. With a monthly production of over 1,000 tons of plastic, this unit manufactures a diversified portfolio, including technical films, shrink films and plain and printed sacks.

The initiative automatically integrated Opcenter APS and Packing Group’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, ALEPH, ensuring synchronization of essential data for planning operations such as extrusion, rewinding, printing and cutting. This connection encompasses production orders, resources, inventory, demand, technical lists and other necessary information, resulting in increased accuracy and agility in factory routines.

The planning of these processes, respecting optimization rules for scraps, setups and order fulfillment, began offering a strategic view to PPC, both in meeting delivery deadlines and creating more efficient scenarios for using production capacity.

The benefits included clarifying and commercializing PPC knowledge, which had previously been handled by a key person in the factory. Furthermore, as each unit of the group had previously conducted its processes differently, the solution enabled standardization, providing more visibility for other units and enabling scalability.

As a result, the Packing Group now has a more structured, collaborative and efficient planning process, which is essential to support its high-volume and complex operation.

The Packduque project

The first phase of the Packduque project focused on providing the company with a clear view of the benefits an advanced planning and scheduling (APS) tool could offer with a quick return-on-investment (ROI). The total timeline for this phase was 20 weeks.

Phase I concentrated on defining the corporate PPCP process and standardizing data, registrations and processes. This step ensured that all implementation methodology phases were executed within the set timeframe, thanks to the high quality and dedication of both the Packing Group and LSB teams.

Involving the factory floor team in all discussions was another key factor in the success of the project. The team’s expertise was essential in building the business rules in the APS, resulting in production schedules that accurately reflected the reality of the factory.

The results

The Packing Group’s implementation of Opcenter APS, which is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services, yielded impressive results from the first day of operation. Going live was smooth, enabling the first production schedule to be passed to factory leaders at the beginning of the agenda.

By setting up optimization logic for the scheduling of extruders, results were realized in the first year, including a 16 percent reduction in setup times, which directly impacted the plant’s productivity and minimized material waste.

These optimizations, combined with the strong commitment of Packing Group’s team to the changes in routine, resulted in a 21.2 percent increase in overall productivity, allowing higher production volumes using the same machinery. These improvements showed Opcenter APS was a strategic tool for optimizing production planning and scheduling and maximizing operational results.

“The speed and agility in factory scheduling with the rapid scenario simulation have saved analysts a lot of time, allowing them to focus more on strategic activities,” says Kleber Pereira, the project manager of corporate planning and demand, Packing Group.

Additionally, there was a significant reduction in the time required to schedule the factory. Before implementation, this process took 80 minutes. After adopting the solution, the time was reduced to 30 minutes, representing a 62.5 percent optimization.

This improvement enabled the transformation of PPC into a more analytical and strategic area, allowing the team to focus on other activities without the need to expand the workforce. In practice, this translated into faster and more accurate responses to new demands from both the commercial sector and operations, as simulations can now be conducted quickly and with confidence, ensuring more reliable decisionmaking.