Leuze electronic no longer optimizes its purchasing and production decisions with ERP as in the past, but on the basis of the Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS) tool DISKOVER from SCT. This provides much more accurate sales forecasts. Leuze electronic is not only impressed by the sophisticated rule sets and scheduling algorithms; working with the tool is also straightforward and extremely convenient. Management consultancy Abels & Kemmner supported the implementation.

Leuze electronic is a specialist manufacturer and provider of measuring and switching sensors, image processing and data transmission solutions, as well as components and systems. More than 1200 Sensor People at 24 locations worldwide are employed in development, production, sales and service, supported by more than 40 sales partners worldwide.

Creating a link between inventory planning and delivery reliability
Looking to optimize its high delivery readiness still further without tying up too much capital in inventories, Leuze was searching for a way to make its inventory planning more transparent in relation to the required delivery reliability. Such transparency is necessary to be able to make more informed decisions about how to adjust the degree of delivery readiness, also from a capital point of view. This is essential for sound business planning, opening up the ability to view and control inventories also from an overall enterprise perspective in line with relevant KPIs. The previously used ERP system was not fully fit for that purpose. It provided comparatively basic forecasting procedures that made it possible to establish current levels of delivery readiness and to set defaults, for example at least 95%. However, it was not possible to transparently show which materials had to be kept in stock, and in which quantities, to guarantee this readiness.

It’s certainly not news that industrial planning and procurement processes are a highly complex, intermeshed collection of a wide range of sub-processes. More intelligent and highly developed solutions are becoming better at striking a balance between unequal variables such as availability, inventories and efforts. Serag-Wiessner, a medium-sized company specialising in medical and pharmaceutical products, coordinates the multitude of parameters it needs so that the balancing act comes off.

From its base in Naila, Bavaria, Serag-Wiessner and its some 200 employees produce and deliver surgical sutures, textile implants for the pelvic floor and infusions. Of the approximately 3,000 articles in its range of surgical sutures and textile implants, categorised by thread type, strength, length and needle-thread combinations, some 1,500 are kept in stock at the warehouse. The company’s 25,000 customers, including hospitals, registered doctors and wholesales both locally and abroad, expect deliveries within 24 to 48 hours. To meet these requirements, stocks are retained in the finished goods warehouse, which was previously dimensioned by the planners based on ERP order proposals. Since their own attempts to significantly reduce stocks were not successful in the past, the management decided to entrust the task to the supply chain specialists at Abels & Kemmner.

The most important requirement was to develop and implement a sustainable solution. Besides a perfectly matched concept, attention was therefore also placed on the solution’s implementation. From the start, the need for a permanent solution raised the question of how – or indeed whether – the existing ERP system could support it. Restrictions in production and logistics had to be considered, and included in reviewing planning parameters. Besides the sales variables – delivery times of 24 to 48 hours and average delivery availability of 96% – the planning parameters also had to take into account the intended limit of 1,200 monthly production orders and the associated retooling processes.