Franciaflex chooses Ortems to plan production line workload, ensure reliable and shorter lead-time

Franciaflex is a French manufacturer of bay window fixtures with more than 700 employees and revenues of 100 million. The company produces 4 lines of complementary products made-to-measure: shutters, windows, exterior & interior awnings and a range of controllers (motors, etc.) that are incorporated into all products. Franciaflex has 5 manufacturing plants in France, specialised by line, whose products are 100% made to measure to supply a base of skilled contractors who equip individuals and companies.

Franciaflex chose Ortems' solutions for its two plants in Rochetoirin (38) - exterior awnings - and in Le Rheu (35) - shutters, to display and compare workload and capacity in real time by production line. Displaying information sooner helps Franciaflex anticipate variability and increase production lead-time reliability.

Philippe Coquet, Director of Manufacturing at Franciaflex, said: "Franciaflex is a company that only makes products to measure with many product SKUs that are produced to order with very short lead-times of 7 business days for awnings and 8 business days for shutters. Our production to order requires our production facilities to be extremely responsive. To satisfy our customers who are increasingly demanding with respect to lead-times (e.g.; summer awnings are subject to high seasonality), we operate on a just-in-time basis.

We first worked on our production flows by establishing an organisation with flexible hours based on the workload and on methodologies like Kanban. At the same time, we also worked on computerised information flows by introducing Baan ERP in our various production plants. In spite of these investments, we recognised that we didn't have a visual planning tool with finite capacity to provide very short-term workload visibility and capacity across our 10 production lines based on material and resource availability. With the ORTEMS solutions we hope to do a better job of managing our manufacturing complexity, planning workload on our production lines sooner and further shortening our delivery lead-times in order to satisfy even more our 4,000 customers."

Ren Desvignes, Ortems' CEO, added: "This new contract reinforces Ortems' position in the complex made-to-order operations. As the leader in its market, Franciaflex's choice demonstrates once again that our solutions' flexibility and modelling power allow us to handle our customers' complex core business issues."