Our mission is clear—to deliver unmatched quality and efficiency while prioritizing sustainability. With the integration of EluxMES, we've optimized manufacturing processes, reduced quality issues, and lowered work-in-progress inventory levels.
Mastering the Art of Sustainable Production
Electrolux Group is making great strides in sustainability. In 2023, the global household appliance producer reduced its carbon emissions by 33%, used renewable energy to power 60% of its operations, and sent less than 1% of its waste to landfill.
As a result of these efforts, the company was recognized as one of the World’s Most Sustainable Companies in TIME’s inaugural sustainability ranking and became the top appliance brand in the Financial Times’ list of Climate Leaders 2024.
“We are the most sustainable company in the segment,” said Plinio José Amann, Electrolux Group’s global head of digital manufacturing solutions. “We have real commitments to sustainability and we focus on manufacturing our products with zero waste, using renewable energy and in a way that will positively affect the environment and the communities around us.”
How does a company like Electrolux Group – which has 36 factories worldwide – achieve this level of success with its sustainability initiatives? According to Ramez Chamma, the company’s chief operating officer for its Latin America operations, one reason is its ability to optimize its manufacturing processes.
“When you produce right the first time, you are using fewer resources,” Chamma said. “And this is what DELMIA Apriso helps us to do.” Dassault Systèmes manufacturing solution DELMIA Apriso will help Electrolux Group transform global production operations.
Challenge
Before leveraging DELMIA Apriso, Electrolux Group managed most of its manufacturing operations manually – a gargantuan task when you consider that its Curitiba, Brazil, plant alone produces over two million products using more than 2,000 different molds.
“We had difficulties in mapping out where a product was at any moment in time,” said Gabriel Leal, a production operator at Electrolux Group’s Curitiba plant. “We lost a lot of time searching through paperwork and manually tracking products.”
With limited access to information about what was happening on the factory floor, Electrolux Group’s staff would only know if something went wrong if they were physically there to witness it. Communication between employees also was challenging and decision-making was often difficult.
“Because we were working with a lot of paper and a lot of manual information systems, we had to make decisions based on data that wasn’t entirely accurate,” Amann said. “This meant we sometimes took sub-optimal actions.”
Electrolux Group sought a solution that could help it manage its end-to-end operations – including logistics, quality, production and maintenance.
“To produce smart products, we need to also have a smart manufacturing process that can be flexible, reactive and tailor-made to our customers’ needs,” Amann said. “We recognized that we needed to replace our analog way of working with a digital solution.”
Solution
After a thorough market review, Electrolux Group decided that Dassault Systèmes’ cutting-edge manufacturing execution system (MES) DELMIA Apriso was best suited to its needs.
The company began with a pilot at its plant in Sao Carlos, Brazil. “It was really important to us that we ran an initial test to learn how the solution works and to understand how our processes need to be adjusted to benefit from the system’s full capabilities,” Amann said. “The pilot took around two years of real teamwork, implementation and testing. We had the top management involved and a lot of help and support around training and change management.”
This approach paid off. Following its test implementation at Sao Carlos, Electrolux established a structured approach that it could follow for future rollouts. As a result, the rollout at Curitiba was completed in just 12 months. Since then, three more factories fully implemented the solution, and two more are currently in the process of implementation.
Benefits
With DELMIA Apriso now providing Electrolux employees with real-time access to critical manufacturing data, decision-making is more informed, productivity increased and quality improved.
“With the dashboards clearly visible to us, we can monitor quality and production in real-time, so there’s no delay,” Leal said. “I don’t have to wait until the end of the shift to see how things are going, as we used to do before. Now I know in real-time if a line has stopped or not, if production is negative or not, and if the quality is good or not.”
“We now have full transparency,” Amann added. “At any minute, I can look at the dashboards and I can see the status of production, the quality of output, if anything needs actioning and even how much energy I am spending. Having all that information online and available for everybody at the same time allows for faster actions, faster decisions and a lot of improvements on top of that.”
The numbers speak for themselves. Chamma believes that introducing DELMIA Apriso led to an increase in productivity of at least 6% – and that equates to a far more sustainable operation and millions of dollars in savings. “We are producing more products right the first time,” he said. “We are selling more at a better cost, delivering more in a market that is growing like crazy. That’s really fantastic.”
Before DELMIA Apriso, mistakes were inevitable due to lack of visibility. Now, with complete transparency, we can make faster, more confident decisions. DELMIA Apriso is a key piece in our transformation process, allowing us to integrate the plan and automate the flow with real-time visibility of execution progress.
Focus on Electrolux Group
Founded in Sweden in 1919 by entrepreneur Axel Wenner-Gren, Electrolux has shaped living for the better for over 100 years by reinventing what great taste, care and wellbeing experiences mean for their consumers. In 2023 Electrolux Group had sales of SEK 134 billion and employed 45,000 people around the world. Their headquarters is located in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Electrolux share (ELUXb) is listed on Nasdaq OMX Stockholm. Under their brands, including Electrolux, AEG and Frigidaire, they sell household products in over 120 markets every year.
For more information: www.electroluxgroup.com/en/
Ramez Chamma, LATAM COO, Electrolux Group:
When you produce right for the first time, when you produce more with the same resources, you are using less resources. That is the help of DELMIA Apriso in sustainability for operations. Electrolux Group we are producing home appliances like washing machines, cookers and refrigeration.
Plinio José Amann, Global Head of Digital Manufacturing Solutions, Electrolux Group:
We want a solution that can cope with logistics, quality, production and maintenance. This was something that DELMIA Apriso offered.
Ramez Chamma:
DELMIA Apriso is a good partner helping us to improve our quality, our productivity and our sustainability so you can produce more using less resources. You get the benefits of that here in our Curitiba plant mainly, where we have more than 2,000 different molds managed at the past manually and now automatically. This could improve productivity by more than six percent, generating important savings for us in Latin America.
Plinio José Amann:
DELMIA Apriso is helping us in sustainability. They provide us with real-time data on what's happening in the factory, in the processes, so we can see if there is a waste and we can really act on it preventively.
Gabriel Leal, Production Operator, Electrolux Group:
With the dashboards clearly visible to us in production, we can monitor quality and production in real time, so there's no delay. I know in real time if the line is stopped or not, if production is negative or not, if quality is good or not.
José Machado, Plant Operations Director, Electrolux Group:
Apriso will be our basis in order to transform our factory.
Plinio José Amann:
If we implement this in all the plants, we have lots of benefits in terms of scalability because we can have one team supporting one solution for all sites.
José Machado:
We have confidence in the system. It does everything we need it to do. It’s at the heart of our largest factories.
Ramez Chamma:
We are selling more, better cost, delivering more in a market that is growing like crazy. That's really fantastic.
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