Opcenter (Preactor) APS

Talleres Seicon is a small, 30 person, design and build engineering company based in Castellvi de Rosanes, near the Spanish Catalonian capital of Barcelona.  The company’s main activities involve the manufacture of metal fabrications including a high proportion of design with their customers.

Mr. Conrado Ginel is the Production Director and also co-owner of the company.  “Even though our company is small, the nature of our business means that there is constant change in the products we are designing, and of course once agreed upon, the customer wants it as fast as possible.”  

Before using Preactor, controlling projects was a task extremely time consuming and costly. The company had an interface from their CAD system onto Excel, and to this they added a Bill of Materials with the appropriate routing.  From this, they created work-to-lists. The operators at shop floor level then manually entered actual times on sheets of paper which were then collected as each job was finished.

Conrado Ginel again, “We were aware of our need to have a tool that would allow us to control our productive resources better.  One of the main problems we had was to provide reliable finish dates. On many occasions, the customer wanted a delivery that we could not guarantee as we had no real visibility of what we could achieve. Another critical requirement was the stock reduction.”

The company started to look what was available on the market and contacted Binary Technologies, the Preactor Network Partner responsible for Spain.  Julio Consola, director and project manager of the Talleres Seicon application commented on the requirements, “The company is a typical example of one that is relatively small but has a very high level of complexity in its business. Despite having just 30 people, there was a high level of difficulty in process synchronization. Nevertheless, our previous experience in other projects allowed us to agree with the customer a control level that suited their needs and make suggestions on how they could make improvements to the way that they worked which they could easily apply.”

Conrado Ginel commented on their work with Binary Technologies.  “Binary is not the typical IT company who tries to adapt the software to the customer requirements without questioning if what is demanded is the right thing or not. The skills and experience of their personnel in other projects have permitted them to participate in how the new organization of Talleres Seicon should be.   Another issue which we valued highly was the proposal to execute the project in phases. Clearly, our initial expectations and what we were able to control didn’t exactly match, that is why we needed to design a project that could grow with our ability to control.”

The company found that they could use Preactor for their needs. Information on each project is entered directly into Preactor as it is an engineer-to-order and make-to-order environment. 

Julio Consola talked about implmentation.  “The project took a few months to be implemented, but really wasn’t used at all initially. Some time after, when the company changed important people in their internal structure, the company decided that the time had arrived to start using it.  This took a few weeks to go live.”

And the benefits were almost immediate.  Within 3 months, real measurable benefits could be measured.

Conrado Ginel again, “Before implementing Preactor, we used to have piles of stocks everywhere, but that is radically different now. Our on-time delivery performance is now more than 95% and work in process down by 60%.”

This has translated into real savings of €80,000 per year, while an increase in efficiency of 17% means an additional saving of €40,000 per year. Urgent transport costs that were running at €20,000 are now almost a thing of the past.