Case Study at Hitachi Metal Inc.

Hitachi Metal Inc. used to rely on the mainframe computer to schedule production processes, which took up large amounts of time. Additional, manual corrections afterwards made the whole planning process labor intensive. Still, the monthly production schedule is not feasible and results in constant failure to meet customer order deadlines. To solve this problem, implementation of a production scheduling system is investigated.

After a trial phase in research and development, the Asprova production planning system is recommended as the best solution. Flexibility and accuracy of mapped processes and resources, a highly advanced scheduling logic, and user-friendly interface are powerful advantages with which the competition cannot keep up, and thus the decision is made. In reality, it takes less than three hours from planning to issuing work instructions.

Data transfer from the mainframe computer is now done on a weekly basis, instead of a monthly on and changes to the plan can be realized within short amounts of time with Asprova, without becoming a burden. Customer satisfaction has increased greatly thanks to significantly decreased delays from order reception to production. Employess at Hitachi Metal are ale to expand functions in Asprova on their own with the help of technologies such as COM-interfaces, plug ins, or Microsoft Excel.