High craftsmanship made in Veneto

Founded in 1969 by Ottorino Pivato as an artisan carpentry firm, the Castelminio di Resana (TV) company is distinguished today by an openness to innovation that passes not only through the choice of materials, finishes or product lines, but also through the renewal of its way of working, making it more efficient with the use of advanced technological tools; Pivato Srl  is a manufacturing company  that for more than 30 years has specialised in the production of interior doors. Despite its size as an industry, with around 60 employees and 13,000 square metres of factory space, the company continues to maintain a strong vocation for innovation, renewal and customisation; In fact, the theoretical combination of all variables in Pivato’s list would allow the production of more than 17 million different doors; The company combines the unique characteristics of wood from Val di Fiemme with technological research and development to ensure that the doors have equally unique characteristics;

Software that best supports the organisation

In early 2011, at the end of a software selection process that lasted about 9 months and aimed at choosing a new management solution, Pivato decided to opt for the ERP Freeway® Skyline and entrusted Eurosystem with the project to change the company’s information system. The management software in use, implemented 11 years earlier, was now suffering from a certain degree of technological and functional obsolescence, having been born on the company’s logic when production was five times lower and the variability managed was much lower;

The implementation of Freeway® Skyline involved all areas of the company: from customer order quotation to the processing of sales notes, with the consequent invoicing and collection management, via production, planning and reordering of materials for the various departments; “The main critical issues analysed and resolved in the implementation of the new platform were the revision of the coding of all articles and the chart of accounts, the introduction of a system MRP (Material Requirements Planning) for production planning, and the simplification of BOM management and conditionals, which are necessary due to the company’s high production variability,” explains Alberto Sfriso, Software Consultant Eurosystem.

Also in the area of production, the company benefited from the interface between management and production departments, which enabled correct
and effective management of processing, traceability and order progress;

MRP: facilitating daily activities

In the production area, every choice on the structuring of bills of materials, warehouses and machining centres was from the outset oriented towards the use of the new Freeway® Skyline MRP software, set up and configured in several steps to refine the behaviour of the software, production advances and material management data;
“Currently, despite the enormous variability of Pivato’s production the MRP ‘cycles’ smoothly through 800 thousand active items and releases around 10 thousand production orders every week,” Sfriso points out. In 20 minutes you can update the production progress and check the time remaining to complete the process; The software detects problems with the correctness and validity of BOMs and cycles, inconsistencies in the master data of codes and their production data, failures to meet lower levels of pegging, and actual or expected delays, guiding operators through an active troubleshooting process;

Speed and resource optimisation

“It is significant that for the entire order collection, which was initially put into production by three people in one week, now three days and one person are enough,” explains Sfriso; The ability to operate efficiently on heavy masses of data, evaluation of variants and changes in simulation, visualisation of the plan in graphical form, support for the planner in carrying out simulations in real time and reacting quickly to detected problems are just some of the advantages enabled by the introduction of MRP software within the management system;

The technical department, on the other hand, can manage in a massive, historicised manner the coding of production operations that provide production equipment and operators with all the information they need to carry out a specific hole, cut-out, machining or milling operation, including managing the specific design. Finally, a system was developed to automatically determine the expected delivery date for each customer order, starting from the composition of the required doors within the order, the production lead times and the presence or absence of any work account stages;

The introduction of the Freeway® Skyline ERP and MRP software represented a real transformation not only in technology, but also in the habits and ways of working of the company as well as of the customers, that first benefited from a more efficient internal system and can provide, among other things, a new order confirmation form that is simpler and clearer than the old one.