Reducing planning time from days to hours and enhancing scheduling via centralized production planning

Achieving operational excellence in the tech industry

Founded and headquartered in 1976, in São José, Santa Catarina, Brazil, Intelbras is a Brazilian technology company designed to enhance businesses and homes. It operates in security, connectivity and energy, offering solutions that serve large projects and simpler needs. Its goal is to make homes more equipped, businesses smarter and cities more connected.

To ensure operational excellence, Intelbras has four manufacturing units in Brazil. These plants operate in a highly complex and verticalized environment, dealing with a large number of stock keeping units (SKUs) – which require more inventory items, multifaceted processes and long purchasing lead times – challenges in the electronics sector and being one of the most dynamic and strategic industries in Brazil and the world.

Overcoming complex production challenges

The electronics market in Brazil is highly competitive, with companies demanding constant innovation and extremely efficient supply chain management. This scenario becomes even more challenging when considering the variety and quantity of demanded products, forcing companies to manage higher levels of inventory, precisely aligned with variable demand.

For Intelbras, the need to launch innovative products within reduced deadlines, while maintaining high-quality standards and competitive prices, is a constant challenge. Importing electronic components from China, driven by tax issues, advanced technologies and local market competitiveness, is one of the strategies the company adopted to ensure efficiency and cost-effectiveness. However, the over 16,000-kilometer (km) distance between
the two countries presents a logistical challenge.

In addition to external challenges, Intelbras’ production processes require precise coordination and detailed planning. Plastic injection, component assembly on boards, semifinished goods production and product assembly demand enormous attention to detail. This makes planning and production scheduling tasks critical to ensure each step is carried out efficiently without failure.

Internally, Intelbras faced significant challenges in its planning and scheduling structure. Approximately 80 percent of the production scheduling was decentralized, with factory leaders making decisions in isolation, resulting in more complex management. Additionally, the company manually generated the master production schedule (MPS) using multiple spreadsheets before being input into enterprise resource planning (ERP).

The search for process standardization and a consistent database represented an obstacle for the future implementation of SAP – a strategic project that would soon begin. Intelbras needed to implement a solution to centralize its data and standardize its processes, creating a structure that supports transitioning to SAP efficiently and securely.

These external and internal challenges made the need for a more robust, automated and collaborative planning model evident. Intelbras needed a solution capable of representing its business rules, considering real-world capacity constraints and centralizing decisions based on consistent data. Thus, the company sought an advanced planning and scheduling (APS) solution that could bring greater assertiveness, speed and results to its planning and scheduling processes. After analyzing the main tools available in the market, Intelbras teamed up with LSB, a Siemens Digital Industries Software partner, to develop the project for digitalizing these processes, using Opcenter™ APS software. Opcenter is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services.

Using Opcenter to solve decentralization and visibility issues

The project’s main objective was to automate, standardize and integrate production and material planning steps, solving the decentralization and visibility issues that Intelbras was facing. Opcenter Planning software, the core of the solution, became responsible for defining the MPS and performing the material requirements planning (MRP), considering all the company’s business rules. With this tool, Intelbras eliminated its dependency on manual spreadsheets and consolidated the entire process into a single, reliable platform with consistent logic, governed by the planning team.

“Integrating Opcenter APS was a protagonist among a series of satellite projects, which made the company understand the responsibility of each one in the process of change,” says Fernando Junkes, information technology (IT) director, Intelbras.

The production and purchase orders generated in Opcenter Planning were integrated into Opcenter Scheduling, which was responsible for validating the production capacity while considering all the manufacturing process constraints. This integration allowed Intelbras to precisely orchestrate material consumption and capacity utilization over a 14-month planning horizon. The company now has a more precise, dynamic and coordinated view of demand, inventory and capacity.

This integration between planning and scheduling tools transformed the operation, enabling the planning and scheduling and material planning and control (MPC) teams to work more assertively. Using business intelligence (BI) within Opcenter APS provided advanced data analysis, offering strategic insights to align production plans with commercial goals and operational constraints. Centralizing information also eliminated misalignment between areas and enabled a faster, more reliable decision-making process.

After consolidating the production plan, the production and purchase orders were automatically sent to SAP, facilitating execution and integration with the company’s ERP. This advancement accelerated order execution and consolidated integrating with the SAP system, laying the foundation for Intelbras to implement the future SAP production planning (PP) module later.

With this, Intelbras created a more agile and reliable process, with a platform that would sustain the current operation and the company’s future growth.

Another key point is that using Opcenter APS strengthened the company’s relationship with the supply chain. Intelbras can share scheduling dates and material consumption generated in Opcenter Scheduling with suppliers via supply relationship management (SRM), providing greater visibility for all parties involved and increasing supply chain accuracy. This is helping level raw material inventories and gradually improving service levels across the entire supply chain.

“Today, with Opcenter, I enter the system and see what product or raw material I will have to deliver by the end of the month,” says Alexandre Patuci, industrial director, Intelbras. “I can clearly see how much of my production plan is covered by the raw materials I have in-house.”

This integrated, data-driven solution directly addressed the project’s main challenges and created the foundation for the company’s achieved operational and strategic results.

Improving planning and scheduling processes, traceability and efficiency

Implementing Opcenter APS at Intelbras significantly transformed the operations of the planning and scheduling, MPC and logistics departments, improving agility, control and visibility. One important milestone was centralizing production scheduling, which is now almost entirely performed by the planning and scheduling team. Before implementation, factory leaders were responsible for around 80 percent of the scheduling, which led to a decentralized and unstandardized decision-making process. With the digitalization and standardization brought by Opcenter APS, the planning and scheduling team assumed most of this task, while the factory was only responsible for occasional adjustments, particularly in cases of absenteeism or operational issues. This change significantly increased planning control, governance and consistency.

Another major benefit was eliminating manual work, which involved dozens of spreadsheets and disconnected reports extracted from the ERP. With Opcenter Planning, tasks that previously took days were completed in hours, with much more reliability and traceability. This automation sped up process execution and improved integration between departments, creating a single centralized platform for the entire production planning process.

The MPC team’s routine also underwent a major improvement. With the structuring of business rules and the integrated view of the planning horizon, the MPC team gained a more accurate and predictable view of material consumption. This visibility aligned demand and inventory policies, resulting in more balanced supply, with less risk of shortages or excess.

In the logistics area, using Opcenter Scheduling to calculate material consumption dates allowed for more effective integration with suppliers. Information about consumption and delivery deadlines is shared via SRM. Aligning inventory policies became more precise, optimizing material flows and ensuring production lines receive necessary components at the right time.

Furthermore, integrating Opcenter APS with a manufacturing execution system (MES) ensured Intelbras executed production orders generated during planning accurately on the shop floor. This created a stronger link between tactical planning and operational execution, maintaining consistency across process stages.

Introducing the discrete manufacturing system with systematically using production orders represented a paradigm shift in Intelbras’ factory management. This new model brought more traceability and control to processes, increasing the governance standard and preparing the company for a higher level of digital maturity. The production orders became central elements in capturing cost variations, allowing for a more detailed analysis of deviations and improving decision-making focused on efficiency and profitability.

Laying a solid foundation for future innovation

All these advancements created a solid foundation for Intelbras, contributing to its project for SAP implementation, which took place approximately one year after the Opcenter APS implementation. The structure established by Opcenter, with well-defined processes, reliable data and a culture driven by accurate information, ensured a safer and more efficient transition to the SAP PP module. The MRP consolidated in Opcenter APS made the native MRP of SAP less relevant, offering a more robust and flexible calculation engine, aligned with the complexity of Intelbras’ operations and with more accurate and realistic forecasts.

“When we talk about something as structuring as APS, tools like Opcenter APS are an investment we’re making for the future,” says Patuci. “Often, the gain you get is in continuing to exist.”