Dauper uses Opcenter APS to make production scheduling 300 times faster

Sweet beginnings

Upon opening its doors and beginning production in 1988, it’s unlikely Dauper’s founders envisioned one day providing cookies to consumers around the globe. But that is exactly what happened, and rather quickly.

Established in 1988 in Canela, Rio Grande do Sul in the south of Brazil, one year into operations Dauper became the exclusive cookie supplier to McDonald’s®, marking the beginning of a long and delicious partnership. In fact, every cookie ordered with a Big Mac or Quarter Pounder and fries from 1989 to 1999 in Brazil was made by Dauper.

A small start-up in Brazil partnering with a billion-dollar global brand is the stuff movies are made of. It is also how successful, sustainable companies are created. Dauper hit the bigtime and soon became global suppliers to other food industry heavyweights such as Kellogg’s and Nestlé as well as Mondelez and Unilever. Currently, Dauper boasts over 150 brands and has added chocolates and granola bars to its portfolio.

But the Brazilian luxury cookie and candy maker is growing at such a rapid rate the company intends to increase its production capacity by 35 percent. To reach that lofty projection, Dauper realizes it needs immediate changes to its production processes.

Production obstacles

While the end result is well known – cookie is made, customer eats cookie, everyone is happy – how that cookie goes from factory to consumer can be an exhausting process; it was for Dauper in the early days. Dauper’s production process is primarily make-toorder (MKO). As such, the company’s production, planning and scheduling departments require immediate responses on the progress of orders, as well as the factory’s short, medium and long-term workload visibility.

Line setup can vary from product to product. As a result, the production scheduler looks for combinations that minimize changeover to maximize productivity. In addition to changeover considerations, each client has a unique bill-of-materials (BOM) to meet specific customer specifications for raw materials. For example, what McDonald’s requires is going to be different than what Kellogg’s needs.

Another critical factor is the time required to change a product’s sequence; once the schedule is established, any necessary changes require manually adjusting everything that is affected. It’s impossible to quickly and easily see the impact any schedule change will have on other orders.

In the face of these challenges, Dauper and partner NEO formed an alliance to implement Opcenter Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) software from Siemens Digital Industries Software, where today meets tomorrow. Before adopting Opcenter APS, Dauper’s production, planning and scheduling team struggled to create optimal production schedules using spreadsheets.

Opcenter APS offers high-level digitalization that immediately brings production processes up-to-speed and helps manufacturers respond immediately to unexpected changes. Opcenter APS is specifically designed to meet this need, using advanced algorithms that balance demand and capacity to generate achievable production schedules.

“Implementing Opcenter APS was one of the company’s first steps to improve their integrated production planning process,” says Bruno Bortolatto, project manager, NEO. “One of the keys to this project’s success was the partnership between NEO and Dauper. Both companies worked with continuous commitment and built a great solution that produced many results.”

With NEO’s expertise in production management technology, the project focused on reducing sequencing time, optimizing line changeover times (setups), having a visual management of raw material status for each product, generating different scenarios of any sales forecasts, and creating reports and customized views to support faster decisions.

Big-time benefits

Opcenter APS immediately accelerated Dauper’s ability to generate a new schedule compared to the previous method. Before the project, it took 2 to 5 days to schedule one month of production. With Opcenter APS, Dauper’s production schedule is generated in approximately 10 minutes, giving the production planning and scheduling department ample time to focus on the analytical side.

“Opcenter APS took the production planning team’s work to a new level,” says Lucas Peres, supply manager, Dauper. “The ease and practicality of production scheduling and the various reports extracted from it increased not only the production planning department but all the others in the company, including sales, production, R&D, financial, and more. The excellent support provided by NEO, not only in the implementation but also supporting our process after that, made our lives much easier.”

The commercial and shipping departments also benefitted from Opcenter APS, as they could easily visualize how much of each item is expected to be produced per day, facilitating client management and the dispatch of cargo. The supply (purchasing) sector also saw immediate gains from Opcenter APS with the newfound ability to obtain the exact dates that raw materials will be needed, based on the production sequence.

Since introducing Opcenter APS to its processes, Dauper is now able to take the sales forecast, consider the capacity of the lines and execute the necessary actions for the production mix to be successfully served with high productivity, lower cost and shorter lead times.

“The power of production scheduling certainly brings the company more speed, visibility of the factory’s workload and the job’s due dates,” says Bortolatto. “Now it is possible to analyze several scenarios and make decisions about production in advance, generating less work and aggregating value through the setup’s optimization, materials needed dates, and more.”