As a champion of corrective lenses worldwide, Essilor has developed the network organization of its production and distribution centers through an adapted evolution of its logistics and IT systems. Split up on three continents (Europe, America and Asia), its 16 plants as well as its 12 distribution centers enable the mass production of 215 million lenses a year. With 244 laboratories very close to customers, Essilor has also a prescription activity for a unit finish on demand. So with over 29,000 people in more than 100 countries and the manufacturing and sale of different types of lenses (rise by 7% in volume), Essilor has become No. 1 worldwide in this field, with a turnover of 2.69 billion Euros increasing by 11% throughout the continents, and a net income of 328.3 million Euros in 2006. With the successful launch of Varilux Physio, Essilor reinforces its leadership and revolutions not only the conception, but also the production of a lens by creating Vision Haute Resolution ™.
For ten years Essilor has been working with the DynaSys solutions and assistance in order to develop the management of its logistics, counting both on a global vision of flows and on the reactivity of proximity service. Since 1997, a framework contract is basing the capacity planning for all their plants and other production and distribution units on the SKEP ® solutions by DynaSys. The final aim of the Continental Master Planning project launched 2 years ago by Essilor and DynaSys is to give an intercontinental dimension to this management.
Based on the existing disposal
According to Essilor, Master Planning means not only the possibility to follow and manage flows in a collaborative way, but also to simulate load levels for production lines and stock levels by product range and to enter results hypotheses further to promotional campaigns. This simulation of variation and loads relocation hypotheses enables to analyze their impact on the whole Supply Chain as well as their global costs. Thus they manage to trade off with full knowledge of the facts, between continental and worldwide objectives.
“Based on the existing logistic disposal, this project naturally followed our collaboration with DynaSys”, explains Jean-Claude Gazé, Planning Manager within the WorldWide Supply Chain Projects Department at Essilor. In order to manage at best the complexity of all the flows, the adopted strategy for this project is a progressive one.
A monthly Master Planning
First planning will be continental, with a Master Plan by continent in Europe, North America and Asia. At the same time, within a collaborative process based on these Continental Master Plans, the project includes the implementation of a standard reporting disposal, prelude to a Worldwide Master Plan. In the background, this implies to line up everything in a unique and worldwide database that would supply the Continental Master Plans in the same way. “What we have ever done by exchanging and comparing Excel files, result of the planers’ work at the end of the month, has to be done based on a real time follow-up and on simulations made easier thanks to the tools used”, explains David Bourgoin, Master Plan Project Manager at Essilor.
With these three components -Master Plan by Continent, worldwide Datawarehouse, standard reporting based on same tools-, the intra and intercontinental management of capacity-requirements can increase in reactivity and flexibility. “From the possibility to adjust the aim at a worldwide level, on a two months horizon, the Continental Master Planning project has to enable switching to a monthly rhythm”, adds Jean-Claude Gazé.
In coherence with Sales & Operations Planning
The Master Planning project plans to interface this worldwide supervision process with the operational planning processes, particularly the Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) calculation now revised twice a year. The operational Supply Chain Management processes are mainly managed by Oracle Applications. “Idea is to improve the coherence of the whole Supply Chain process, integrating all its components”, summarizes Jean-Claude Gazé. So trade off and decisions resulting from the planners’ work are automatically entered as constraints into operational processes, thanks to the complete IT integration of the Master Planning system with the different Supply Chain structures.
Modeling and technological jump
The first step of the Continental Master Planning project of Essilor was to model the planning process: due to the complexity of flows, to a huge number of references and to the sharing out of production (plants, prescription centers, subcontracting, distribution centers), it took place during the year 2005. “One of Essilor’s characteristics is the huge variety of items -almost 300,000 references-, so they work on Master Plans in an aggregated bucket, that is to say about 2,000 product families”, adds Jean-Claude Gazé.
After the modeling led in partnership between the DynaSys team, the Essilor one (three people) and external consultants, the deployment was realized continent by continent. This project led Essilor to migrate from the SKEP ® solutions to the collaborative web technologies offered by the new generation of Supply Chain solutions n.SKEP ® by DynaSys.
“Since the planning process has to be supplied with aggregated and reliable data, the main difficulty of the project is the worldwide Datawarehouse constitution”, comments the Project Manager David Bourgoin. With the n.SKEP ® technology, the Master Planning and Datawarehouse integration is ensured de facto.
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