Ortakçı Glass

On the surface, a vehicle screen may seem like a simple part, however, the amount of resource – and time – that goes into producing it must not be underestimated. Each piece of glass must be cut, prepared, tempered and packaged to order – and that’s before it gets to the automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to be installed on the vehicle.

Based in Turkey, Ortakçı Cam handles the entire manufacturing process for glass products predominantly for the automotive industry. Every day, the company deals with all manner of custom requests from its global customers, creating everything from vehicle screens and driver cabins to emergency exit glass. They choose Ortakçı Glass for its high product quality, competitive prices and ability to deliver on time.

Until recently, though, Ortakçı faced challenges meeting tight customer deadlines. Its planners used spreadsheets to manage the production schedule. Routing selection was done manually, and they couldn’t take into account production constraints or prioritize customer orders, resulting in long lead times.

“We needed to optimize our processes for more efficient production,” said Merve Demircan, production planning officer at Ortakçı Cam. “We have a vast amount of production lots, including repeat orders, covering all the major industries we serve. Our clients don’t generally give us forecasts or long-term orders, which can be challenging to manage.” 

Ortakçı found the solution to its production scheduling issues in DELMIA Ortems, which it now uses to plan and schedule all its production processes from glass preparation to packaging.

Today, with DELMIA Ortems, Ortakçı’s planners manage a detailed schedule and can quickly associate work orders with the right machinery to optimize and sequence tasks. They are able to take into consideration all customer due dates, production constraints, set up and changeover times, and priority orders.

“With DELMIA Ortems, we can plan and schedule with finite capacity for different periods of time,” said Nuray Taner, production planning and logistics manager at Ortakçı Cam. “The solution provides us with detailed scheduling, optimized capacity planning, material planning, load balancing and deadline setting functions in the short and medium term.”

Ortakçı worked with its technology partner Grupas to implement the system and moved to DELMIA Ortems within six months. Grupas supported the company throughout the implementation, making sure the project stayed on track and that everyone received the right training so they could get the most out of the solution.

“The Grupas team worked closely with us to draw up a project plan and clear timetable,” Demircan said. “They helped us to develop the interface design, make any necessary configurations, integrate our material requirements planning system and delivered end user training to smoothen the transition to the new software.”

Now fully up and running on DELMIA Ortems, Ortakçı has gained a clear view of all upcoming work orders and available resources in the workshop and is able to give its customers an accurate timeline of when their glass and mirror products will be ready. And because all information is linked, planners can see which orders are on time, which are delayed, and take timely action to avoid late delivery.

“We can now monitor our capacity occupancy and idle status in real time,” Taner said. “With DELMIA Ortems, we can plan our material needs, shifts, personnel, machinery and maintenance schedules. At the same time, we can directly manage the set up to minimize production changes and analyze how any modifications will impact our scheduling according to our key performance indicators.”

DELMIA Ortems’ powerful optimization algorithm also helps the company to make the most of its resources. It can simulate a wide variety of what-if scenarios, compare them and immediately see how they will affect the production plan.

“It means we can react faster and more accurately to unexpected events,” Taner said. “We can check in advance which lines are bottlenecked so we can take timely action. We can run simulations on our forecast orders and see what kind of workload they will place on our production lines, how many shifts they will need and whether they require overtime work.”

As a direct result of its new planning and scheduling capabilities, Ortakçı has achieved the following benefits:

• 40% increase in customer service levels

• 20% increase in productivity

• Machine set up times reduced by 25%

• Overtime reduced by 20%

• Overall time saving of 65%

“Backed by the power of DELMIA Ortems, we have the capabilities to meet our customers’ deadlines faster and more reliably,” Demircan concluded.