Clementoni: growth and greater control with CyberPlan

Clementoni, a company known for its educational games under the motto “growing is a beautiful game”, has turned to Cybertec to be supported in its growth process. It has therefore invested in specific software solutions in order to gain greater control of production.

In particular, the introduction of the APS CyberPlan software has allowed the company to govern all production planning and scheduling processes.

The innovation path of the Marche company told by Alessandro Angeloni – Senior Production Planner of Clementoni.

A visual planning of a few codes was no longer enough

Initially, when the company was still mainly artisanal, the production planning was carried out by the department heads using folders, sheets and tabulations and also the scheduling was carried out manually. All this was possible and appropriate to the size of the time, where the number of codes was very small.

The problems occurred at the same time as the growth in the market of the company that for the Supply Chain has resulted in a greater number of codes to be managed and quantities. At the same time, communication problems arose between production and the sales office, in fact the information was not always up-to-date. The company therefore needed to manage the strong growth it was experiencing, equipping itself with a structure that would allow it to keep the production process under control.

Software was needed to give a global view of needs, inventories, considering production advances: This gave greater visibility of the availability of raw and semi-finished materials in order to organise the entire workflow. A general and perhaps not very up-to-date “glance” was no longer enough.

 

Revolutionize production planning, to maintain control and leadership

For the programming office, the need arose to increase visibility and access to information that had to be all available in the same environment, in real time and all subject to processing even by several users at the same time.
The scheduling of production also required greater precision and punctuality. The premise to this was the ability to assess loads well and manage machine saturation. An easy tool was needed, with an immediate glance that would help define the current and future production capacity for each work centre/machine.
Considering also the “toy product” that suffers from a great seasonality, it was necessary to increase and simplify the dialogue and the quality of the information exchanged between the production and commercial departments.

Advanced Planning and Scheduling as a response to new needs

Clementoni decided to equip himself with new tools. A software selection was therefore carried out, to identify the best solution that would allow Clementoni to evolve methods and tools used to manage the entire supply chain. The company was determined to innovate, increasing the potential of the planning department by increasing its versatility, but maintaining its size, in terms of dedicated people. In addition, the additional integration of the purchasing part, in line with the sales forecasts and the production process, has made it possible to better manage the long lead time components. Clementoni thus selected CyberPlan, Cybertec’s APS, to schedule full-capacity production.

The largest and most recent implementation also took place in relation to other IT tools and found in Cybertec’s consultancy all the support and knowledge necessary to get the most out of this innovation.

Thanks to its foresight and also to the CyberPlan solution, Clementoni has grown considerably in recent years, going from a turnover of €80 million in 2001 to over 187 today; all this while maintaining a substantially similar structure and therefore agile and streamlined.

Speed, visibility and communication

CyberPlan has proven to be a versatile and fast tool that allows Clementoni to schedule production more easily despite the considerable growth, also in terms of complexity.

Production planning has seen an increase in the number of codes managed, the saturation of work centres and visibility into the future load. The management of all this was possible thanks to the immediate and concrete visual impact given by CyberPlan to analyse the capabilities of the production process.

The relationship with suppliers has also benefited from the new solution. Thanks to the APS tool, in fact, the suppliers of the Marche company know the quantities and terms of production requests immediately and without barriers.

CyberPlan also supports management in the management of the company structure thanks to the vision of future production and requirements in terms of hours and equipment.