ABS improves on-time delivery with Quintiq

AcciAierie Bertoli SAfAu

case study

ABS improves on-time delivery with Quintiq

2 Supply chAin plAnning & optimizAtion

ABS improveS on-time delivery with QuintiQ

AcciAierie Bertoli SAfAu | cASe Study

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Supply chAin plAnning & optimizAtion 3


Fast facts BusinessSpecialty steel

LocationUdine, Italy

SizeOver 1,000 employees

MarketsLocal market and 40 countries in Europe,the Americas and Asia

Production capacity1.4 million tons per year

Export46% of turnover

The customerAcciaierie Bertoli Safau SpA (ABS), Italy’s top specialty steel producer, is one of the top three specialty steel producers in Europe. Created in 1989 with the merger of Officine Bertoli (founded in 1813) and Safau (founded in 1909), ABS has three production facilities in Italy and more than 500 customers in Europe, the Americas and Asia.

The company’s range of specialty steels is one of the widest in Europe, in terms of both quality and dimension. ABS’ portfolio encompasses ingots and cast, forged and long-rolled products.

ABS serves the automotive, construction, defense, energy, petrochemical and transportation industries.









The challengeABS needed a planning solution to support its manufacturing operations in an increasingly dynamic and competitive market. It wanted to enhance production efficiency while improving delivery times and performance. This could only be attained with a planning solution that could optimize ABS’ resources and accommodate the complexities of its business.

ABS faced a number of challenges:

• Its existing system was unable to accommodate all business complexities nor any changes in parameters or rules.

• Planning was done against budgets and quotas. Hence, there was no finite capacity planning. The planned operations did not always result in feasible input for schedulers.

• Production simulations were done manually using spreadsheets. As such, changes required lots of manual readjust ments by ABS planners – consequences of the replanning were unknown.

• Scheduling information (e.g. start/end times, set up time) was not indicated in ABS’ plans. Scheduling support was limited and fragmented and no true decision support for scheduling decision making.

• KPIs were not used in planning and scheduling. Thus, there was poor visibility of consequences in production and a lack of visual control over the material flow and buffer controls.

• Production and scheduling knowledge was confined to the heads of schedulers and on printed documents.

• ABS had difficulty meeting its promised delivery dates. Its customers were demanding accurate promised delivery dates and expected to be notified in the event of a delay.

The company needed a solution that could predict the earliest possible delivery times to enable the sales team to make competitive offers. Increasing production complexity called for a planning solution that could propose and compare alternative planning scenarios to help management select the best option.

ABS wanted to boost profit with a more customer-centric approach. To achieve this, ABS needed to be able to strategically optimize the use of its resources to keep complex manufacturing processes running smoothly while also meeting business goals.

In order to align ABS’s logistics and production processes with increasingly rigorous customer demands, the company needed a planning solution that could optimize the flow of information and materials needed to produce an extensive range of products.

The new solution needed to integrate seamlessly with the existing SAP ERP platform to support ABS’ supply chain operations. It needed to be robust, flexible and reliable for planning, scheduling and optimizing resources. It had to support best practices, improve customer service, key performance indicators (KPIs), and productivity and reduce working capital while maintaining margins.

















The choice“We were looking for a system that was robust, flexible and user friendly,” said Luca Visentini, ABS project manager. “We started with a few potential suppliers and shortlisted three vendors. We communicated a detailed problem to the finalists and asked them to provide us a solution.”

With this test, ABS was able to evaluate the proposed solution’s capability, the consultants’ competence and how the team operated.

Ultimately, ABS chose Quintiq as its supply chain planning & optimization (SCP&O) partner after methodically evaluating a number of solutions against several key criteria.

The company wanted a solution that would:

• Provide cutting-edge capabilities and give it a significant competitive advantage, as well as improve the transparency of the entire supply chain.

• Deliver available-to-promise (ATP) functionality while incorporating all its macro business constraints and

plant processes.• Facilitate the integration of steel reheating furnaces,

rolling, and finishing downstream shipments.

• Enable campaign and rolling plan optimization.• Allow planners to simultaneously plan lines while

scheduling rolling operations. • Interface with its ERP system (SAP).

“We chose Quintiq because they showed professionalism, knowledge of processes in the metallurgical industry and had the right skills for planning and optimization. Quintiq demonstrated competence and efficiency from analysis through to prototyping and negotiation,” said Visentini.

“We were looking not only for an IT solution, but also for a supportive consultant. We sought a cohesive and focused team that would advise us on how to do business, and who would prompt us to question the way we have been working and show us better ways of doing things.”

“We were quite impressed by the proof of concept and the demonstration of how Quintiq’s software could fit ABS’ planning processes and stringent requirements,” he said. “We found it especially valuable that Quintiq’s software allowed us to compare scenarios and make what-if analyses.”

“We chose Quintiq because they showed professionalism,

knowledge of processes in the metallurgical industry and had the right skills for planning and optimization.”

– Luca VisentiniABS project manager









ImplementationThe implementation of the Quintiq solutions (Company Planner and Scheduler) took 18 months. ABS created a team and developed a process for end-to-end testing. This involved organized change management and real-use simulation with Quintiq’s support. Early in the process, technical limitations prevented ABS from executing the parallel testing described in the Quintiq methodology but the Quintiq team promptly resolved those issues.

“During each project phase, we had internal discussions and sessions with the Quintiq team. Issues were raised through a user-friendly solution that allowed us to track their resolution progress. At times, there was a high number of issues. Nevertheless, Quintiq coped easily with this, as well as the complexity of the issues," said Visentini.

"Quintiq has a lot of experience in our industry and its success in this sector provided the added value we were looking for. We are confident that the Quintiq solution will jumpstart the next big step for us.”

“We were quite impressed by the proof of concept and the

demonstration of how Quintiq’s software could fit

ABS’ planning processes and stringent requirements.”

– Luca Visentini ABS project manager









Offices: www.quintiq.com/locationsEmail: [email protected] | Web: www.quintiq.com

The futureThe Quintiq solution allows ABS planners to accurately project delivery performance for the coming weeks on a daily basis at the individual-order level. This transparency and traceability further enables ABS managers to immediately see the results of planning decisions, and how those decisions affect KPIs such as delivery performance, inventory levels and cycle times.

ABS uses Quintiq to optimize order acceptance, resource capacity planning, and material planning. At its facilities, the Quintiq solution is already helping ABS to reach its primary production goal: 100% delivery of all products on time and in full (OTIF).

The Quintiq solution helps ABS manage order acceptance on the basis of finite capacity planning, transportation lead times, capacity reservation, and material availability on a “just-in-time” basis.

ABS has begun to deploy the Company Planner solution at its recently acquired plant in Sisak, Croatia. The Company Planner will be instrumental in integrating the new plant into ABS' operations as well as eliminating operational inefficiencies.

The Quintiq solution will eventually also improve customer service at the ABS Sisak plant.

The resultQuintiq provided a planning solution for ABS that was a perfect fit. At the company’s facilities in Udine, Italy, the SCP&O solution is now optimizing all manufacturing flows, including casting, pre-heater and hot-rolling mill and finishing.

The system provides full transparency and rationales for how ABS uses its resources. It schedules ABS' processes and delivers detailed daily updates of the entire backlog.

Within just a few months of the company using the solution, ABS' on-time delivery saw improvement. Other KPIs have stabilized and improved as well.

For short-term, daily production scheduling, ABS uses Quintiq to optimize productivity, shorten lead times and decrease the volume of work in progress (WIP).

Quintiq assigns loads to heaters and sequences the hot-rolling mills and the critical finishing lines, taking into account existing rules and constraints such as campaigns, product dimensions and other key variables that affect steel production. The software platform also provides the possibility to plan alternative resources.

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Technology

ABS improves on-time delivery with Quintiq