Novosibirsk Aircraft Production (NAPO), a Russian manufacturer of commercial and military aircraft, says it has selected Infor ERP SyteLine to support growth, increase throughput and streamline operations.
Alexander Solovyev, NAPO’s director of IT, says that the solution, coupled with its APS (advanced planning and scheduling) engine, will help it to sustain rapid growth, reduce inventory, create production synergies and increase user satisfaction and productivity for its more than 7000 employees.
“The production of an airplane is a complex and lengthy process,” he says. “To improve our ROI, we need to operate in a just-in-time production manner: Infor will help us to plan our purchasing activities and manage our inventory so that we can keep our costs down, leading to a lower total cost of ownership over other solutions we considered.”
Prior to its new system, NAPO used a system of spreadsheets and applications it developed in-house, which meant keeping excess inventory on hand for multiple stages of production.
Solovyev explains that SyteLine recognises when steps in the manufacturing process have been completed and automatically places an order for parts and components required for the next phase – thus eliminating idle inventory and associated costs.
He also refers to the fact that SyteLine automatically issues inventory requests and collects data from various systems – a significant improvement on the old system, which required several steps just to retrieve and analyae data or enter information.
The implementation methodology was designed by Infor channel partner Frontstep CIS, to enable NAPO to operate using just-in-time production methods. To accomplish this, Frontstep has also developed a production planning algorithm, based on a supply chain management concept that considers all assembling processes as internal supply chains.
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