Elcam Medical
How frePPLe permitted to ease processes and circulation of data within the company
Elcam produces high quality single-use medical devices intended for flow control applications for the medical OEM industry, providing the needed components for critical care sets. They work in close partnership with medical areas such as IV Therapy, Vital Signs Monitoring, Interventional Cardiology & Radiology and Dialysis.
Located in Israel, Elcam Medical has a manufacturing site in Italy. Over 200 people work there every day. Their protocols aim to implement continuous improvement in product quality, product safety and effectiveness, and customer service.
The Challenge
Elcam’s production facilities in Italy include about 50 plastic molding machines spread across 5 clean rooms, a number of assembly robots, and a number of internal and external manual assembly areas.
Generating a feasible production schedule is quite challenging giving the interaction of constraints on press and mold availability, press changeover times and alternative production options. With a growing order book, manually maintaining this production schedule with pen, pencil and spreadsheets became increasingly problematic.
As Elcam Medical has excellent service-level standards, the team investigated in a solution allowing them to maintain and exceed these requirements.
The local team then attempted to implement the Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS) module integrated in the ERP from the parent company in Israel. Unfortunately it didn’t work out as it was not adapted to their specific needs.
The Solution
After testing out a few alternatives, they soon came to the realization that many of them necessitated heavy changes and implementation delays, while frePPLe was more agile, cloud- based, and service oriented.
They installed frePPLe’s production planning module which now allows them to generate production schedules for all resources. Automated interfaces from the ERP have been set to bring all data to frePPLe. That’s how an order book of 2000 customer orders can be planned within a few minutes.
FrePPLe also provides improved visibility in the delivery dates of sales orders and the constraints impacting these delivery dates like last-minute orders, changes in resources allocations, etc. When unexpected events arise, the planner using frePPLe can switch jobs to different time slots, move jobs to alternate resources, and adjust production order quantities.
Thanks to automated process and data integrations, the team has now a clear view of the entire production chain. They can react swiftly and keep up to their promises to their clients.
