Delpharm, active in the production of medicines for third parties, gives maximum attention to the customer, respecting their orders in terms of dates and quantities. Paola Moroni, responsible for the planning of the Cerano (NO) plant, tells us about the process of strengthening planning and scheduling.
Would you tell us the path that led you to look for an APS solution?
“I started working in this plant almost fourteen years ago” says Paola Moroni, who continues “in 2016 the plant was taken over by Delpharm and this step led to the decommissioning of the tool used for scheduling. Initially, we approached production planning through the use of Excel files, which presented all the limits of an “old-fashioned” planning, so to speak: the files were not connected with the management system (SAP) , changing the dates of planned orders took entire days, we no longer had the MRP to support us, we were not connected with warehouses and sales, etc. We then submitted a request to the Delpharm corporate to purchase a tool to manage production planning and scheduling. “
How did the selection process take place?
“Following our requests to equip ourselves with an appropriate tool, we have activated a software selection procedure” – says the head of planning of Delpharm Novara. “First we identified the developer companies, then we presented management with three solutions as per internal policy, and we were able to indicate our preference which fortunately was approved: CyberPlan.”
What are the reasons why you chose CyberPlan?
“The main reasons why we chose CyberPlan are 2:
- The fact that Cybertec was the only one to offer both the MRP and the scheduler in a single solution. This gives additional security when making changes to the production plan, or making simulations, because the MRP verifies the part of the materials and allows us to draw up feasible plans.
- The advantage of having already used and tried the product in the past. Cybertec offers the possibility of making a demo to customers, to confirm the goodness of the product, but in our case we had even used the software in the past. It was a tool with which we had already worked for 9 years, which we knew and with which we always had a good time, a guarantee“.
How did the implementation take place?
“The project started from some meetings with the project manager to map the process flows and the various machine resources. The fields that needed to be read within the SAP management system were mapped below.
Thanks to the support of the Cybertec team and the internal team, the verification of the correctness of the fields was carried out at the same time as the mapping, speeding up project times. In addition to planning, we also wanted to involve other business functions in the design phase: production and customer service, precisely to map the flows of sales and production orders as precisely as possible. Obviously I was eager to use CyberPlan because my files in Excel were difficult to manage, they were not connected to SAP and what we did in Excel we then had to transfer by hand to SAP with considerable waste of time and risks of errors. Thanks to the Cybertec team and the Delpharm team, in a short time we had a demo, a sort of practically definitive prototype, which already allowed us to schedule and therefore control the perfect functioning of the software. The implementation lasted from late March to July, so I started using CyberPlan only 4 months after the project kick-off.”
What are the characteristics of the production of medicines?
“In the Cerano plant we manage both the manufacture and the final packaging of medicines. The production of medicines is bound by precise regulatory directives and GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice). With regard to the planning part, for example, a very important aspect regarding the components is obsolescence, linked to both physical and regulatory reasons. We also manage this aspect thanks to the CyberPlan tool. In fact, Cybertec’s APS allows us to control the expiration of materials and provide the planner with preventive alerts that help in scheduling the use of expiring materials.”
How does CyberPlan support you in the planning process?
“Thanks to the implementation of CyberPlan we are able to check the actual feasibility of a plan and compliance with deliveries.
By virtue of how we have organised the supply chain and CyberPlan, we are able to prepare both short-term production plans and long-term production proposals. Thanks to Cybertec’s APS, in fact, the first activity we do is to schedule all orders, of which we subsequently export the dates to SAP, which allows us to have MRP and RDA that are created correctly in the management system.
Another aspect that we are able to achieve thanks to CyberPlan is the optimization of production sequences, thanks to the set-up matrices that allow us to order the various orders in the most efficient way, making the best use of resources.
At Delpharm Novara we plan and produce about 350 finished product codes, with variable batch sizes. In order to guarantee maximum flexibility to the customer, we need to reschedule production sequences on a daily basis. It is therefore necessary that the production sequence proposed by the tool is as efficient as possible in terms of time. CyberPlan, thanks to the set-up matrices, offers us a production plan that allows us to make the best use of our production capacity by reducing format changeover times.“
How does Cybertec APS help you achieve your business goals?
“CyberPlan – says Moroni – supports us in controlling the KPI requested by the customer: the OTIF (On-Time and In-Full delivery) which is now 99.8% also thanks to the fact that the APS CyberPlan software allows us to instantly check compliance with the delivery date.
In addition, CyberPlan allows us to have visibility of the saturation of production lines for the months to come, allowing us to implement alternative plans, with the aim of always respecting customer requests.“
How does planning and scheduling software help communication?
“The implementation of CyberPlan has also allowed us to improve Delpharm’s communication, both internally and to customers.”
The head of planning says that “With regard to communications within the plant, planning shares production plans every day, divided by resource, with different departments: management, production, customer service, quality control and warehouse. The entire company therefore has the opportunity to have up-to-date information regarding the planned processes, any critical issues and also compliance with the KPIs. In addition to this, we share with the customer care department a table exported by CyberPlan that highlights the production dates and those requested by the customer, allowing you to see which Sales Orders are possibly critical and those that require priority.”
Delpharm, drug manufacturing
Delpharm is one of the European leaders, by size and ability, in the discovery and manufacture of medicines. Over the course of more than 25 years of activity, Delpharm has built a solid reputation and has grown by adding new production sites to the group.
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