"OptiVision has been crucial in helping us develop improved infrastructure, organization and production facilities to unify information for effective decision making. This project has enabled us to vastly improve our business processes, enhancing the group's reputation as a low-cost paper manufacturer offering customers high-quality products and services."
Giuseppe Lignana, Honorary Chairman, Cartiere Burgo
Cartiere Burgo, one of Europe’s largest papermakers, installed Honeywell’s OptiVision software at several of its mills and offices to improve processes and increase efficiency. Benefits include:
In 2004, Cartiere Burgo and Gruppo Marchi merged their paper businesses in order to compete better in global markets and benefit from synergies in terms of efficiency and production. The merged group has a total of 15 production facilities (14 in Italy and one in Belgium). The aggregate output capacity is of 3.2 million tonnes of paper.
In the mid-1990s Cartiere Burgo management realized that to maintain competitiveness, real-time production information from its mills was essential. Customers were asking for accurate delivery times for their orders, but the information wasn’t available.
“We were using a legacy logistics management system and various mill management systems that had been built by our in-house IT staff over the last 20 years,” explained Lorenzo Anzola, IT Manager, Cartiere Burgo. “The main drawback was that these systems did not provide real-time production information from our mills. Their replacement was clearly an urgent need.”
At the same time, Cartiere Burgo was facing the year 2000 and Euro currency compliance. The company also wanted to outsource much of its IT equipment and concentrate on its core business of making paper.
Cartiere Burgo recognized that the solution was to streamline its operations with a state-of-the-art information and business system. Initially the company searched for an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. However, the best ERP solution was still not able to meet some of the core requirements. After widening the search, Cartiere Burgo was pleasantly surprised to find that Honeywell’s OptiVision Business Logic software offered these functions and more in a standard product built specifically for the pulp and paper market.
OptiVision Business Logic software optimizes sell price, fixed costs and variable costs by optimizing manpower requirements, allocating fixed assets, managing working capital and prioritizing capital spending, all of which were vital to take Cartiere Burgo into the next millennium. “OptiVision was the only system that had proven enterprise-wide order fulfillment capabilities, including a fully integrated corporate sales/paper mill environment,” said Lignana. “Furthermore, OptiVision was able to support production across all 11 mill sites and shipping/transportation from all our internal and external warehouses. The final reason why we selected OptiVision was its superior system architecture, which allowed us to migrate from a mainframe environment to a more cost-effective client server environment.”
The OptiVision system provides planning and execution at the corporate level and full manufacturing execution at the mill level. Applications span all the elements of production management, including customer service, production control and optimization, materials tracking and quality management. Implementation of the $8 million project started in 2000 and was completed successfully by the end of 2004. Honeywell installed OptiVision at the corporate headquarters, 11 mills, 10 sales offices and 17 external warehouses, serving over 500 concurrent users. The project was one of the most comprehensive OptiVision installations ever conducted.
Following the success of this project, Cartiere Burgo has decided to use OptiVision for pulp management at its plant in Belgium. The project began in March 2005. Discussions are in progress to use OptiVision for order handling, planning, warehousing, shipping and invoicing throughout the conglomerate. Finally, as all of Cartiere Burgo’s OptiVision systems are under a service contract, Honeywell is continuously upgrading the OptiVision systems on an ongoing basis.