Eurowipes

If you’ve ever used a baby wipe or face mask, then there’s a good chance it was made in one of Eurowipes’ manufacturing facilities in France. Known for developing natural, effective and safe products, health and beauty brands and retailers around the world rely on the French company to supply them with wipes, cotton discs and impregnated sheet masks for various hygiene, cosmetics and health applications. 

Part of the Anjac Health and Beauty Group, Eurowipes manufactures millions of products across eleven production lines in France, making to stock and to order. As a market leader, Eurowipes strives for continuous improvement and must adapt to a wide variety of different customer requirements, including short and long lead times, while maintaining a high level of quality. 

“We needed a planning solution that would help us make decisions and enable us to be agile with completely different orders, from 2 days to 12 weeks, but on the same production lines. We were looking for a collaborative tool not only for the supply chain, but for the whole plant,” said Frédéric Janvier, Quality and Supply Chain Operations Director at Eurowipes.

Eurowipes felt it spent too much time manually entering and updating production and planning schedules, leaving little time – less than 10% – for analysis.

“We had so many spreadsheet files with data that wasn’t always reliable,” said Sophie Haouisee, Supply Chain Manager at Eurowipes. “Updating them was time consuming. The aim was to improve our key performance indicators and better satisfy our customers’ requirements. In addition, the time lost analyzing the availability of raw materials and the lack of information sharing when we encountered unforeseen events led us to set up a decision-support and monitoring tool.”

Dassault Systèmes technology partner KEONYS supported Eurowipes throughout the project to implement an effective solution within the plant. 

“This support for change took the form of various support and improvement actions,” Haouisee said. “We organized a kick-off meeting between the plant and KEONYS, as well as monthly follow ups with DELMIA to address critical issues.”

The project took nine months to implement, from definition, functional analysis and data cleansing to installation and go live. The strong involvement of the management committee, which supported the plant through the changeover, was key to the project’s fast rollout. 

“In addition to the four people dedicated to this project, users from various departments also were involved, including finance, purchasing, IT and plant management,” Haouisee said. “The communication and involvement of all these teams, including KEONYS, contributed to the success of this project.”

Using DELMIA Ortems,  Eurowipes now better manages the production flow of its products.

“Thanks to this visual solution, we can see production orders, line loads in finite or infinite capacity, and material shortages,” Haouisee said. 

The planning and scheduling solution improves team responsiveness and provides enhanced visibility to reduce cycle times, inventories and lead times. Coupled with its enterprise resource planning system, Eurowipes manages its production more efficiently, while controlling the workloads of the various lines. 

“We are much more autonomous in our decision-making,” Haouisee said. “We can share insights and constraints with management and across the entire company. It’s no longer just the supply chain team making decisions. We have a global view of projects and their progress at all times.”

Not only is DELMIA Ortems enhancing visibility but it also supports the company to meet delivery deadlines, leading to improved customer service ratings. Eurowipes uses DELMIA Ortems to manage and optimize production planning in real time and update the schedule twice a day. The optimization takes into account the availability of raw materials and the capacity of production lines, so they can be loaded or unloaded rapidly.

“In two years, the reliability rate of customer delivery times rose from 88% to 92%, with much better management of our inventories and cash flow,” Haouisee said. 

Three simulations are available to aid decision-making, either to improve the customer service rating, to improve set-up times (with longer or shorter clean-up times) for production operational equipment effectiveness (OEE), or a combination of the two. 

“After ten months of use, we’ve noticed considerable time savings and a much more detailed analysis, enabling us to improve customer delivery times, improve our OEE, and reduce and, above all, control inventory levels,” Haouisee said.