Reduced production schedule generation time from five to two hours, about 40 percent, while reducing changeovers

Digitalizing to improve plastic cap manufacturing processes

With over 25 years of experience, America Embalagens (America) is one of the largest manufacturers of plastic caps in South America. With over 30 production lines distributed between its two units in Brazil and Argentina, America has consolidated itself as one of the most important industries in its segment, serving large customers in the beverage, personal hygiene and household cleaning markets.

In 2016, the company began its digitalization process, investing in its first advanced planning and scheduling (APS) solution. With newly emerging expectations and challenges, America needed to evolve. In 2021, it teamed up with NEO Digital Industries (NEO), a Siemens Digital Industries Software partner with extensive experience in the plastic injection segment, to implement Opcenter™ APS software. Opcenter is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services. Since then, the company has achieved significant gains in reducing processing times, minimizing setup times and responding agilely and assertively to the commercial department.

Integrating Opcenter to overcome packaging challenges

Initially, America’s APS solution for automating production sequencing helped it achieve significant gains in visibility and agility in production scheduling when compared to using spreadsheets.

However, that solution had critical issues that directly impacted its performance and the routine of the scheduling team. Issues such as system instability, the frequent need for the APS provider to correct problems in the solution and slow data integration with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system led America to reevaluate and seek other solutions that would meet its new requirements.

Thus, with help from NEO, America integrated Opcenter APS in only three months, achieving a record implementation time.

The agility and assertiveness in implementing Opcenter APS at America was possible due to the scheduling team’s maturity and knowledge, which was acquired via experience, readiness and quality of the data necessary for developing the project.

Streamlining APS to enhance production

The wide variety of products it offers combined with the large number of production variables gives America’s production sequencing process a high level of complexity. Currently, there are 65 molds, which several injection machines can share, resulting in producing over 358 stock keeping units (SKUs) in the beverage segment and approximately 601 caps for other segments, all in various colors and sizes.

Aiming to innovate value and maximize product performance while keeping sustainability in mind, the company began its digitalization process towards Industry 4.0 by acquiring a high level of maturity and knowledge.

Considering America’s main needs and difficulties, NEO developed a solution focusing mainly on two processes: short- and medium-term fine production sequencing and developing a long-term aggregated plan (the master production plan).

To fine-tune production scheduling, using Opcenter APS allows America to generate production orders from sales orders, sequence orders seeking to optimize setups, allocate alternative molds dynamically on various machines and increase the visibility for inputs and other material needs while synchronizing with production. All of this is integrated with the ERP and manufacturing execution system (MES) America uses.

Alternatively, aggregating production planning allows America to generate the master plan, the master production schedule (MPS), while considering the finite capacity of the factory. Thus, by allocating the demand forecast to the available resources and molds, America can visualize the volume of SKUs to be produced monthly. This way it can identify possible bottlenecks and idle resources, in addition to the anticipated projection of raw material consumption; thus, avoiding a future lack of input.

“Sequencing production today, tomorrow and in the short, medium and long term with ease, agility, speed and assertiveness are among the differentials that using Opcenter APS provides us today,” says Anderson Petter, scheduling coordinator at America.

Reducing production scheduling time via automation

By implementing Opcenter APS, America overcame the difficulties arising from its previous APS solution. Additionally, it achieved significant gains such as reducing data integration time by 30 minutes when integrating the ERP and Opcenter APS. Further, the total time to generate the production schedule for both of its factories decreased from five hours to two hours (about 40 percent), minimized the total setup times and automated the return of sales order fulfillment dates to the sales team, improving the relationship and synergy between the areas.

Another difference was access to reports with detailed views for support and agility in decision-making, in addition to the low rate of need for corrections in the solution.

“By using Opcenter APS, we have greater agility and efficiency in production planning and can generate various scenarios according to our needs and daily challenges,” says Munique Franco, scheduling analyst at America. “Leveraging Opcenter APS, combined with the quick response and technical knowledge of the NEO team, is making a huge difference in the day-today work of the team and the company, enabling continuous development of new solutions.”

Planning future automation projects

Thanks to the infinite possibilities it could achieve by partnering with NEO, America has future improvement projects for its APS solution. For example, it aims to automatically create purchase requisitions in the ERP based on the scheduling dates of sales orders and the demand forecast in Opcenter APS. Additionally, the company wants to improve master production plan generation with more specific rules for the company‘s scenario.