Controlling shop floor production with Armor

Armor was founded in 1922 and today is the world leader in Thermal Transfer ribbons. The ARMOR Group has strong annual growth, 1,800 employees and revenues of €245 million (2016). The Group’s head office is located in Nantes, France. It has production facilities located in Brazil, Mexico, USA, Canada, South Africa, Singapore, China and India, and a main manufacturing plant on the edge of Nantes.

DELMIA has helped the Group optimize operational performance and control production flows in the 600-person Nantes plant, a facility that produces more than 60,000 rolls per day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. The project was a complex one because of the interdependence of the plant’s three main manufacturing shops—ink grinding, spool coating and roll cutting—which needed to be synchronized to avoid overproduction while still meeting delivery lead-times.

In the coating shop, ink tanks are made available to the coating machines based on consumption; each coating batch can consume several tanks and a tank can serve several coating batches. Prior to implementing DELMIA, volumes were constantly growing (+7%/year), which meant planning for this workshop was difficult—equipment was often underutilized and that impacted the rest of the production chain.

The coating shop supplies all of the Group’s Thermal Transfer manufacturing plants and drives the grinding needs. The shop’s production runs typically last at least a week but the team needs to avoid changeovers over the weekend, so effective production planning and synchronization is critical.

By coordinating runs between grinding and coating, DELMIA makes it possible to avoid ink stock-outs and overproductions, and to optimize the management of color runs and the associated changeover times. It also makes it possible for the planning team to accurately predict an operators’ resource requirements versus the forecast load.

“Today we manage and plan all of our manufacturing shops in a semi-automated fashion using DELMIA,” said Connradt. “The system lets us re-compute the schedule every day so we can dedicate the scheduling teams to real value-added tasks, while giving the schedulers flexibility in certain choices or certain situations, such as with test WOs or rush WOs which are injected into the daily schedule.” 

According to Connradt, the benefits are seen at several levels. 

First, the planning requires less human involvement: “Today, manual scheduling readjustments account for just 15% of the calculated schedule whereas, originally, everything was done manually.”  The schedulers also save time for weekend planning: “Before, weekend planning required 2 to 3 hours, whereas now it only takes the schedulers 30 minutes.” 

High customer service levels are maintained, even during major load periods, with the same level of resources: “Without DELMIA, we would never have been able to absorb the current load and maintain our customer service level, while maintaining the same number of material and human resources.” 

Productivity gains have also been recorded: “By finely scheduling the production runs, we have increased productivity, both in terms of production time and changeover time. We are able to limit the risks of product outage for downstream steps in the process while avoiding overproduction, which reduces product and process waste.”

Improved responsiveness: “We have continuous insight into our advance/backlog status and can respond accordingly on a daily basis. The utilization of our manufacturing assets is more efficient, and the value added of administrative tasks is maximized. DELMIA is an excellent addition to our ERP and MES. The combination of the three lets us push automations and eliminate paper documents and double entries, which makes it possible to maximize both the utilization of our manufacturing assets and the value added of administrative tasks.”

For Tony Connradt, the impact has been significant: “Every day, DELMIA lets us control customer lead-time and even improve it, while helping us better manage machine utilization. We’ve seen a reduction in customer lead-time from ten to three business days and a 50% reduction in product stock-outs in the manufacturing shops.”