Colour me real-time

The ColArt group has created a world first real-time scheduling system for the incredibly complex manufacturing process needed to create artist paints

Tuesday, 24 January 2006

Staff at ColArt are used to new technology as part of the ColArt Group who are well known within the artist paint and materials industry as pioneers in new IT and mechanical techniques. With products sold in over 120 countries and 2001 sales of over £116m, ColArt is easily a world leader. Even with highly automated packing and warehousing, the artist paint industry still uses traditional card based batch manufacturing processes due to the sheer complexity of the process.

To make any of its more than 2500 products takes a mixture of around 3000 possible ingredients which can include synthetic, petrochemical or organic in a liquid or powder form. The lead-time for ordering some of these ingredients can be as long as 14 months and many have short lifespan or intricate storage requirements.

As Martin Rutherford, Manufacturing Manager for ColArt's Harrow headquarters in the UK explains: "We are probably the most technologically advanced in our industry, but even we were using a card based batch system for manufacture scheduling. After talking to literally dozens of vendors, we concluded there was nothing on the market that could cope with the constantly changing environment in question."

However in 2003, as part of an ongoing technology evaluation, Rutherford approached Epicor with his request and explained the complexity of the situation. The goal was to create a real-time scheduling system to move the ColArt manufacturing processes towards a "just-in-time" methodology to increase productivity and reduce held stock. A secondary goal was to allow for more accurate reporting for lead times and to analyse utilisation and efficiency of manufacturing machines.

"We justified the expected cost of the project based on a 3% productivity gain and prepared ourselves for a lengthy development process as there is no solution like this on the market to compare it to."

From early 2003 till the start of 2005, Rutherford's team worked extensively with Epicor consultants to configure and in certain areas add new functionality to the APS software, one particular area was in creating logic to improve the cleaning routines of the colour mixing machines as Rutherford explains: "Certain colours can be processed with minimised cleandown routines after certain others on milling machines. So for example a Dark Red is more efficient after a Medium Brown, but if you needed subsequently to make a Yellow in the same machine, that would require a full clean cycle which slows down your manufacturing process." The software now uses a specifically tailored scheduling algorithm to optimise the order of colour processing based on requirement dates and priorities while minimising cleaning cycles.

Another important aspect for artist colours is quality control: "Every batch needs to be tested for colour and consistency at various stages before the next process is started. If a sample fails and the job needs to be reworked or adjusted, this can have a major impact on scheduling - we were also keen to improve the internal communications regarding the result of quality checks" Rutherford explains.

Seamless integration allows the Epicor APS system to get information from terminals with the quality control department to alter schedules and then use third party conductor software to send pager messages to operators and supervision to notify them to either proceed or collect correction or re-routeing instructions for the job.

Rutherford comments: "There were about 20 significant design features we needed to implement with the Epicor developers and by January 2005, we were able to roll out a working system to our oil based colour manufacturing section as a pilot for a wider implementation and so far the results have been very impressive."

The system now provides a real time scheduling feature replacing the paper card batch system. The 3% performance improvement that justified the cost of the project has been easily exceeded and Rutherford highlights several other benefits, "We hold around £1m worth of stock to ensure order fulfilment and we are now able to substantially reduce this, as we can schedule more accurately and manufacture essentially just-in-time to serve our packaging section."

The system collects data from remote terminals at the start and end of every individual process, currently considering approximately 50 of ColArt's manufacturing load centres. The APS software's ultra efficient schedule optimisation tools are used to automatically re-optimise the production plan, in the form of a dynamic Gantt chart, based on every new real-time event. The result is a 100% real-time representation of the manufacturing environment coupled with the forward plan extending some 3 months into the future.

"Using Epicor Advanced Scheduling and Shipping, we can dynamically change the priority of individual products or lines and instantly see the resultant impact on the rest of the schedule. There's no more progress chasing required or speculative estimation of production lead times. The system currently uses base line estimates for processing times, which has proved surprisingly accurate for weekly capacity based planning. However, as the system runs for longer and continually collects invaluable 'real' process data we intend to introduce self-learning feedback of actual process times to further improve predictive accuracy."

"The impact for production planning staff has been extremely beneficial as we have less confusion as different product or line managers try to prioritise on an individual level - the system now works out what is the optimal order for manufacturing."

ColArt have plans to expand the Epicor APS solution across the other manufacturing parts of its UK operation with a view to extending the software to the rest of the ColArt Group based on the final evaluation of the board.

"This is a massive change for us in terms of planning and scheduling and contributes significantly to our continued growth and lead in our industry. I've visited countless operations similar to our own where these same benefits could be derived, not just in our industry but other related business with similar processing requirements such as in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals," Rutherford concludes.

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