About Royal van Eerd Packaging
Royal van Eerd Packaging, based in Tilburg, the Netherlands, is a vital supplier of specialized printed and folding cartons for the pharmaceutical industry.
The challenge
As a growing company with very high standards and ambitions on quality, service, and flexibility, Royal van Eerd decided to scale up its operations by opening a second production facility. While expanding their operations in a 2nd location, maintaining focus on their customers and ensuring timely deliveries remained a top priority.
In the previous setup with one location, production planning was relatively straightforward. With two sites, each order now requires a choice of production site, as orders can be produced on machines at either site. This shift required a new level of decision making.
Given the ambition of Van Eerd to continuously improve and retain high customer satisfaction, it was clear to Royal van Eerd that smarter planning was essential. In a more complex environment, optimization means that various sometimes competing ambitions, including setup times, flexibility, and promised delivery dates, need to be automatically balanced using advanced algorithms.
The project
EyeOn was asked to partner with Royal van Eerd in implementing More Optimal to improve their planning approach.
- Phase 1: Specifying requirements and architecture
The project began with the specification of the requirements for the planning tool, where EyeOn worked with the Royal van Eerd planning team to write the various user stories. This first step laid the foundation for understanding the complexity of the planning process.
- Phase 2: Model design and build
Next, EyeOn gathered and verified the data needed to manually create a schedule. Each order has multiple operations, and to create a valid plan, the sequence should be known, the allowed resources at both locations should be known, different routings should be specified, the correct setup time should be calculated, and so on. In addition to data collection, this phase also included data integration between the existing ERP system and More Optimal to ensure seamless data transfer.
- Phase 3: Building and testing the optimizer
With the manual plan as a first reference, EyeOn started to build the optimizer using the input received from the planning team . This process involved gradually adding constraints and expanding the objectives, starting with a simple optimizer that assigned operations to allowed machines. In the end, the optimizer takes into account the sequence of operations, resource capacity, due dates, preferred resources, setup times, and other factors.
- Phase 4: Validation and testing
After building and testing the optimizer, there was a phase in which the planning team , with the support of EyeOn, performed weekly shadow runs. While the end users were involved throughout the project, this phase served as a final check for the planners to confirm that everything was working as expected.
- Phase 5: Handover and go-live
The final step in the implementation was the go-live. Prior to the go-live, all functionalities were thoroughly tested by both EyeOn and Royal Van Eerd, and everything was documented in a user manual. After the go-live, EyeOn is still available to provide support and answer questions.
Results
The implementation of the new planning tool resulted in a clearer overview of the planning for the upcoming weeks, enabling data-driven capacity decisions and both increased planning adherence and overall delivery performance, retaining higher customer satisfaction.
This project was an important step in Royal van Eerd’s journey to improve its planning capabilities. The integration of the More Optimal planning tool provided them with a scalable, efficient, and data-driven approach to planning, improving productivity, compliance, and delivery accuracy.
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