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real world success
Groupe Plastivaloire Implements Moldflow Manufacturing Solutions Software at Multiple Sites
By Catherine Baghdiguian, Moldflow Corporation
Founded in 1963 and specializing in plastic injection molding of complex components, Plastivaloire has grown over the years through a combination of acquisitions and the construction of new sites. It now has a turnover in excess of 167 million euros and employs 1,700 people. Launched on the Paris stock market in 1991 (symbol: PVL), Plastivaloire now operates out of nine sites in France as well as sites in Poland and Romania. Langeais is the group's headquarters and its largest site, with 82 molding machines ranging in size from 25 to 2,700 tons and a workforce of 450 people.
Most of the group's customers come from three major sectors with a high demand for plastics: the automotive sector, with customers such as Valéo, Faurecia and Vistéon; the television and video sector, with customers such as Philips, Alcatel and Thomson; and household electrical goods and leisure goods, with customers such as Salomon and Seb. Each of these sectors represents about one-third of the group's business, and are all interested in quality, productivity and certification. In response, Plastivaloire has concentrated on developing its skills to obtain complete control of the commercial production processes, helping control costs, delivery dates and production quality variances. This strategy was facilitated by the purchase and implementation at Langeais and other sites of production monitoring software now available from Moldflow Corporation.
According to Mr. Audiger, Plastivaloire's head of Information Technology, "Prior to installing the new products, we realized that we absolutely needed to address product delivery issues by monitoring the shop floor and the workers in real time. For instance, when production was high and more than 40 machines were running, it was impossible to follow or track cycle times. Without a monitoring system we had to wait for the time-consuming manual output of production data at the end of each worker shift."
"With the range of machines we operate and such demanding customers, it was vital for us to find a production monitoring system that would allow us to control our costs, trace production and stay on tight production schedules. Moldflow's MMS/Production Monitoring software was just what we needed and is fully adapted to the plastics injection molding environment," adds Audiger.
The technology was installed easily at the Langeais site and within one month, shop floor technicians and others associated with production became proficient using the software. Today, manufacturing floor terminals attached to production machinery provide vital information to operators such as deadlines, materials, quantities, new orders, scrap rates, etc. Using the technology during production, operators can launch new orders and flag changes in status such as downtimes and reasons for scrapping. Terminals are utilized as raw materials centers and maintain data such as raw material batches, assigned production runs and job lists. "This approach to providing real-time information allows all staff to react if they notice a discrepancy, helps control downtimes and their causes, and thereby contributes to boosting production and overall efficiencies," notes Audiger.
Information obtained from the terminals is useful both on the shop floor, and also to company production analysts who can review the data derived from the system. Multiple reports can be generated, summarizing details by machine, operator, shift, day, week, month, etc. The analysis helps the company to monitor important factors such as scrap rates, cycle times, downtimes and other elements that can affect production efficiency.
"The production monitoring system enables us to improve our machine capacity utilization," Audiger adds. "We have increased machine production and reduced our scrap rates. We are optimizing the information which we receive in real time thanks to the Moldflow system. For each production run, for example, we see improvements in downtimes, recycling times, mold changes, production start and finish times and so on. We've been using the system for seven years now, so the rate of improvement is naturally leveling off, but the improvement is steady," concludes Mr. Audiger.
For more information about Groupe Plastivaloire, visit www.plastivaloire.com.
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