High craftsmanship made in Veneto
Founded in 1969 by Ottorino Pivato as an artisanal carpentry company, the Castelminio di Resana (TV)-based firm is distinguished today by an openness to innovation that comes through not only the choice of materials, finishes or product lines, but also the renewal of its way of working, making it more efficient with the use of advanced technological tools. Pivato Srl is amanufacturing company that has specialized in the production of interior doors for more than 30 years. Despite its size as an industry, with about 60 employees and 13 thousand covered square meters of factories, the company continues to maintain a strong vocation for innovation, renewal and customization. In fact, the theoretical combination of all the variables in Pivato’s price list would allow it to produce more than 17 million different doors. The company combines the unique characteristics of wood from Val di Fiemme with technological research and development that guarantee the doors equally unique characteristics.
Software that better supports the organization
In early 2011, at the end of a software selection that lasted about 9 months and aimed at choosing a new management solution, Pivato decided to opt for theERP Freeway® Skyline and entrusted Eurosystem with the project of changing the company’s information system. The management software in use, implemented 11 years earlier, was now suffering from a certain technological and functional obsolescence, having been born on the company’s logics 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 management of collections, via production, planning and reordering of materials for the various departments. “The main critical issues analyzed and resolved in the implementation of the new platform were the revision of the coding of all items and the chart of accounts, the introduction of an MRP (Material Requirements Planning) system for production planning, and the simplification of the management of BOMs and conditionals, which are necessary due to the company’s high production variability,” explains Alberto Sfriso, Eurosystem Software Consultant.
Also in the area of production, the company has benefited frominterfacing the management system with the production departments, which has enabled proper
and effective management of processing, tracking and order progress.
MRP: facilitating daily activities
In the production area, every choice on the structuring of BOMs, warehouses and machining centers was from the very beginning oriented to the use of the new Freeway® Skyline MRP software, set up and configured in several steps of refining the behavior of the software, production advances and material management data enhancement.
“Currently, despite the enormous variability of Pivato production, the MRP ‘cycles’ smoothly over 800 thousand active items and releases about 10 thousand production orders every week,” Sfriso points out. In 20 minutes, it is possible to update production progress and check the missing time to finish the process. The software detects problems with the correctness and validity of bills of materials and cycles, inconsistencies in the master records of codes and their production data, failures to meet lower levels of pegging, and actual or expected delays, guiding operators through an active process of troubleshooting.
Speed and resource optimization
“It is significant that the entire order collection, initially put into production by three people in one week, now takes only three days and one person,” Sfriso explains. The ability to operate efficiently on heavy masses of data, evaluation of variants and changes in simulation, visualization of the plan in graphical form, and support for the planner in performing 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 and historicized way the coding of production operations that provide the plants and production operators with all the information needed to make a specific hole, cutout, machining or milling, also managing the specific drawing. Finally, a system has been developed to automatically determine the expected delivery date for each customer order, starting with the composition of the doors required within the order, production lead times and the presence or absence of any work account phases.
The introduction of the Freeway® Skyline ERP and MRP software represented a real transformation not only in the technological sphere, but also in the habits and ways of working of the company as well as of the customers, who benefited in the first instance from a more efficient internal system that provided, among other things, a new order confirmation form that was simpler and clearer than the old one.