Producing food and drink comes with a unique set of challenges, and even the sweetest of success stories can face difficulties. Dauper, a Brazilian luxury cookie and candy maker, is no stranger to these difficulties.
Despite starting small back in 1988, they’ve grown into a worldwide supplier for big names like McDonald’s®, Kellogg’s, and Nestlé. However, as demand for their products soared, they faced a big decision point. They needed to find a way to streamline their operations and take their efficiency to the next level to meet this surge in demand.
The challenges faced by Dauper
With over 150 brands under its belt and a diverse portfolio spanning cookies, chocolates, and granola bars, Dauper’s commitment to quality products has made them a standout name in their industry.
Though this growth was obviously fantastic for the company, it did raise new challenges. They now faced the daunting task of streamlining their production processes in order to meet increasing customer demand from major brands, all while maintaining the highest standards of quality and efficiency. Their key objectives included reducing sequencing time, improving line changeover times, and gaining real-time visibility into raw material status for each product. No easy feat with so many different products being produced!
The intricacies of Dauper’s production process highlighted just how important it was for them to be agile and have data-driven solutions. As they operate on a primarily make-to-order basis, Dauper’s production, planning, and scheduling departments required rapid response capabilities to manage orders effectively. With varying line setups and unique bill-of-materials for each client, manual scheduling became pretty labour intensive, as well as prone to costly errors.
Introducing Opcenter APS
Partnering with NEO, Dauper’s decided to implement Opcenter APS which helped to dramatically improve their production scheduling. Previously, generating a production schedule could take anywhere from 2 to 5 days, but with Opcenter APS, this task was cut down to a mere 10 minutes! This freed up the production planning team to focus on strategic analysis and decision-making, further helping to improve Dauper’s processes.
Lucas Peres, Supply Manager at Dauper said:
“Opcenter APS took the production planning team’s work to a new level. The ease and practicality of production scheduling and the various reports extracted from it increased not only the production planning department but all the others in the company, including sales, production, R&D, financial, and more.”
As noted by Lucas, the benefits of Opcenter APS didn’t just stay confined to the production floor. Opcenter APS was able to help Dauper’s commercial and shipping teams with daily production forecasts, making it easier to manage clients and dispatch cargo. Their supply team were also able to nail down raw material orders, making sure they always had what we needed, exactly when they needed it.
Final thoughts
Looking forward, Dauper is now much more prepared to handle the demand their delicious products generate. With Opcenter APS they can now finetune their production plans, stay head of market trends, provide quality customer service, and more. That means higher productivity, lower costs, and faster turnaround times, all thanks to Opcenter APS.
Inspired by Dauper and ready to improve your own processes? Talk to us today to find out how we can help.
