RFT S.p.A. Seals Production Planning Improvements With Logility Voyager Solutions

Logility, Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTY),  a leading supplier of collaborative solutions to optimize the supply chain, today announced that RFT S.p.A. has implemented Logility Voyager Solutions to improve manufacturing planning, decrease inventory levels and accelerate planning time. RFT S.p.A. is a division of Swedish-based SKF, a leading global provider of rolling bearings and seals with 80 manufacturing sites worldwide, sales in 70 countries and 15,000 worldwide distributors and dealers.

"Voyager Manufacturing Planning has helped shorten lead times and increase throughput by enabling us to create constrained plans for each plant," said Flavio Rapezanno, plant controller and project manager for RFT S.p.A. "We can now take better care of our customers and meet their service level requirements, as well as create a manufacturing plan and adapt to fluctuations in demand quickly. RFT S.p.A has already reduced inventory levels in one department by 24%, and we anticipate even greater reductions."

RFT S.p.A. implemented Voyager Manufacturing Planning to improve planning and scheduling in seal manufacturing plants located in Villanova and Varese, Italy. Each plant experiences highly volatile demand and must support high customer service levels while working with one-week visibility into orders. Prior to implementation, the company used manually intensive spreadsheets and time-consuming planning processes to schedule and respond to continual changes in demand and replan manufacturing activities. Master planners at each facility typically spent three days per month planning production and inventory valued at five billion euros (6.5 billion $US), and any variation in demand caused complex, lengthy recalculations. RFT S.P.A. invested significantly in high levels of component inventory to meet customer service levels.

After installing Voyager Manufacturing Planning, RFT S.p.A. has boosted time-to-market and customer satisfaction and simultaneously reduced inventories by 24 percent in three months. Other benefits reported by the company include an increase in the availability and reliability of production; a reduction in planning time from three days to three hours; an improvement in operational performance by decreasing set up time and mold changeovers on production lines; and a decrease in labor expenses.

Voyager Manufacturing Planning is integrated to MAPICS enterprise resource planning (ERP) for automatic data flow and closed-loop planning.