 |
As world leader for corrective lenses, manufacturing in 18 production plants ( 6 in Europe, 6 in Asia, 5 in the USA and 1 in South America) along with a unique network of 173 prescription laboratories, 480 researchers at 4 R&D centres which is part of the Essilor business strategy of maintaining its close contact with local markets the huge challenge for Essilor is to optimise its Supply Chain.
|
| |
Manufacturing is carried out in plants on three continents where 180 billion lenses are produced yearly against the Essilor product portfolio of 100,000 products. This is a result of a business strategy of identifying the best location for production based on value added in order to lower sales prices.
This production strategy is founded on the principle that products with low added value are made in countries where manpower costs are cheap, while those with high added value are made in industrialised countries to be close to the main markets.
The increasing prescription based activity is spread across the subsidiaries and covers the major part of the industrialised world: it consists of several million items, with the added complexity that customers require very short delivery times on orders. |
| |
‘Our first challenge was to improve service and responsiveness with a worldwide monitoring of flows by product range and the reduction of the global cycle for products (covering production and distribution), in order to develop the weekly process. With the worldwide monitoring solution we wanted to get a system enabled to optimise the logistics network considering costs and inventory levels. Now the SKEP® solutions bear fruit it is clear that they will enable us to reach our challenges in the near future’
Eric Javellaud, Logistics Development Manager – Essilor |
| |
Essilor has been using DynaSys solutions for more than 15 years and the decision was made to implement a fully global integrated solution with Essilor employing the following elements: SKEP® Multisourcing, SKEP® Planning, SKEP® eXt Integration and SKEP® e-business solution. The DynaSys solutions corresponded to the optimisation needs of Essilor : optimisation of the global sourcing and of the capacity of each production unit.
SKEP® Multisourcing, multi-sites planning solution for production and distribution, provides Essilor:
- Optimisation taking into account costs and distribution lead times in order to dispatch worldwide flows at the lowest cost and to plan by product range.
- Calculation of the production plants capacity and inventories thanks to finite capacity algorithms (demand coverage, safety stock reconstitution, optimisation of inventory, production and distribution costs, taking into account distribution lead times).
- Subsidiaries-Inventories Server-Production plants allocations, thanks to three level modelling.
SKEP® Planning is a system which uses extended to mid- and long term planning, taking into account the different constraints by calculating Sales and Operations Plans as well as Master Production Schedule. The production planning solution by DynaSys enables Essilor to draft a plan over a 26 week period, by adapting the load to capacities. Today SKEP® Planning is implemented on most of the worldwide production sites of Essilor.
SKEP® eXt Integration enables Essilor to integrate the Supply Chain Planning solutions with the IT systems of the company in a simple and secure way. Since 1997/1998, SKEP® Planning can plug into Oracle.
To make the SKEP® solutions available worldwide, Essilor completed its system of planning optimisation with SKEP® e-business, the SKEP® portal by Internet which links the integrated solution of Supply Chain Planning management to the Internet network. Wherever they are throughout the world, possible users who manage continental logistics, or category managers have the ability to consult data or Master Plan results, carry out simulations, modify sourcing rules (supply on another continent and allocation change by production plant…) and trade off worldwide against continental objectives. |