Business challenge
The organisation’s drug pilot plant faced an increasing customer demand. The planning of production batches was done without a clear view on operator and machine availability. This led to capacity issues and hence a decreased customer satisfaction.
The objective was to:
- Visualise the planned operator and machine capacity vs. the available capacity;
- Consolidate the dashboards of the different areas into one single document;
- Provide the flexibility to the end-user to adjust parameters in face of an everchanging organisational context.
Our approach
All stakeholders were interviewed to assess their needs and requirements and to develop an understanding of the as-is process with its pitfalls. Consequently, an overall scope for the future state was defined and agreed upon with the customer.
With the obtained process knowledge, a model was created using OMP export data, which is transformed by the Power Tool Add-ins from MS Excel. By closely involving the customer’s process owner, the dashboard was further developed. The other core team members were kept up to date by installing a periodic status-meeting. The resulting feedback was used to drive incremental improvements. Using the gained expertise in both the process data and the model, a set of extra-additional visualisations were proposed which gave the customer new insights into the organisation.
Results
The customer is now able to assess the planned versus the available capacity at a glance. This allows the planning to be adjusted in a timely fashion to guarantee and increase customer satisfaction as well as mitigate the risk of internal escalations. Furthermore, the organisation has a renewed view on its internal operations and can now take data-driven decision in order to define process improvement projects and hence increase the plant’s capacity.
Jeroen Simoen
