Valserve

In the highly regulated nuclear industry, Valserve turns manufacturing planning into a competitive edge for performance and reliability, mastering fixed-date contracts and regulatory complexity with DELMIA Ortems.

When China launched a major expansion of its nuclear power program, more than 60 nuclear power plants across the country chose Valserve to supply the safety valves. Most of the new reactors in China are Generation 3 advanced designs, where only the most reliable, proven valve technology is qualified for use. Valserve’s win reflected its long-standing reputation for quality in the sector and marked a significant step up in scale for its manufacturing operations.

To meet demand, the French manufacturer grew its workforce, expanded its production sites and reconsidered its entire approach to planning. However, what worked before could no longer keep pace with a business now measured in decades of committed work and hundreds of thousands of concurrent operations.

Amid all of this, security, quality, performance and reliability underpin all aspects of Valserve’s business. Every valve carries its own trail of certifications, authorizations, resource qualifications and quality checks. The same discipline applies to deadlines: every delay erodes into the company’s margins, so planners need to identify the critical path, anticipate disruption and test scenarios of varying complexity to react within the hour to daily contingencies. Valserve’s fixed-date, project-based contracts make this particularly demanding as no two orders are alike. 

Valserve’s decision to move to Dassault Systèmes’ planning solution DELMIA Ortems followed years of planning with spreadsheets, which made it difficult to model and record information in real time given the sheer volume of data involved.

“In a hyper-connected world, we needed a solution integrated into our enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that could model how we work and reflect our planning culture,” said Damien Bernard, planner at Valserve. “As the nuclear industry continues to scale and develop, and we take on higher volumes of orders, it became increasingly impossible to manage everything manually. Our planners need reliable data and access to the latest capabilities to explore every scenario before making a decision.”

DELMIA Ortems stood out because it could handle both sides of Valserve’s business: the contract-to-date project management the company’s fixed-date nuclear work demands, and the flexibility to plan for orders ranging from a few weeks of standard production to two or three years of highly specific manufacturing. 

At Valserve, planning stretches over 10 to 15 years, which is long by most standards but short compared to the time it takes to build a nuclear power plant. The company needs DELMIA Ortems to model more than 400,000 operations, including inter-operations, waiting and processing times, subcontractors, with individual tasks ranging from an hour to several weeks. This volume increases the complexity of planning and the value of simulating it before committing to decisions.

To manage all this complexity without disrupting live projects already years into execution, Valserve rolled out DELMIA Ortems in stages.

“We started with simulations of new projects to anticipate the workload, then added load schedules and control lists for the workshops, followed by richer business rules, revenue forecasting, identifying the last missing item, critical path analysis and priority decisions,” Bernard said.

Day to day, the planning solution checks each new production order and proposes a plan, which the planner then confirms or modifies. With DELMIA Ortems, they can smooth out the subcontracting workload and decide whether or not to open overtime and change priorities, which was very difficult to do before.

“Recent global disruptions are a reminder of the importance of business agility,” Bernard said. “Being able to quickly analyze a situation, make rational decisions and act effectively when a supply chain is interrupted allows the organization to stay on course and remain aligned with its objectives, even in a complex and uncertain environment.”

DELMIA Ortems applies artificial intelligence (AI) to every stage of the schedule, covering long-range capacity planning all the way down to the sequence of operations on a single workshop floor. The solution monitors material and capacity continuously, so a change anywhere in the plan is automatically flagged to planners.

“The system doesn’t wait for us to notice a problem,” Bernard said. “If material arrives early, it re-optimizes the schedule and shows us the knock-on effects immediately. Thanks to AI, we can react faster and see further ahead.”

This foresight leads to tangible benefits across the business: a significant improvement in schedule adherence rates for machining, welding and assembly; tighter control of deadlines, since planners know when to follow up with suppliers; fewer delays thanks to improved supplier visibility; higher production volumes; and more reliable schedules and commitments.

“Previously, it took two to three days to make a decision and by then it was obsolete,” Bernard said. “Now, we can resolve the most serious crisis in half a day, often within the hour. We can model and test several scenarios thanks to AI and see the blind spots. And because we can take on more orders and confidently meet contract commitments, we’ve seen a 20% increase in annual revenue.” 

Valserve is now exploring how to synchronize scheduling with suppliers and customers to anticipate disruptions earlier and protect the fixed-date commitments its contracts depend on.

“The next step is bringing that same visibility outside of our organization, so the whole value chain can replan together in real time,” Bernard concluded.