A comprehensive solution for demanding production planning
Merima Oy’s vision is to smoothly deliver the most demanding shipbuilding projects to its clients. Merima’s innovative solutions are not serially produced. Instead, the solutions are always tailored and unique. This means that work planning is broad in the beginning and becomes more specific as time goes on. Planning this kind of production requires special expertise and good systems to support it. When Merima wanted to make its production clearer and more efficient, it chose Delfoi Planner as its production planning software.
Aiming for improved competitiveness and profitability
Merima operates globally everywhere where cruise and passenger ships are being built or refurbished. The company’s aim is to be a partner of choice in creating ships’ public areas for the entire life cycle of a ship. In order to improve its competitiveness and profitability, Merima wanted to make its demanding production and delivery process more efficient as well as speed up its new solutions’ entry to the market.
“We have a wide range of orders, which consists of about 10–20 big projects and hundreds of order lines annually. Before, we used Excel spreadsheets for production planning, and it was impossible the manage the entire project through 3–4 different systems. We needed a single piece of software that would allow us to manage the entire project and that could be integrated with our ERP system,” says Janne Säkkinen, Merima Oy’s Production Director.
Delfoi Planner – everything you need in one package
With a new production planning software, Merima wanted to shorten lead times as well as improve productivity and delivery reliability. The company also wanted the solution to improve the transparency of and the availability of real-time information on its operations as well as make change management easier. Merima surveyed the options on the market and ended up choosing Delfoi Planner.
“We compared various options. Some had many features we didn’t need, and we didn’t want to pay for anything unnecessary. Some seemed to be so incomplete that we saw them as risky and didn’t want to start testing a system that had not yet actually been used anywhere,” says Säkkinen. “Delfoi Planner, on the other hand, already had everything we need, and the features had been tested during many projects. Delfoi’s good references as a provider of solutions for large companies were an important factor when we were making our choice.”
Good cooperation sped up the deployment of the new system
At Merima, Delfoi Planner was deployed comprehensively and widely throughout the production organisation. Merima uses Planner’s SOP, APS and MES features, and the system is used daily by 34 people. In addition to production management and planning staff, site managers and all workers have been trained in using Planner.
“The deployment went very well. We set up a project team and drew up specifications of the things we wanted to achieve. We were quickly able to start testing the system and using it in production. The users have also embraced the new system. In the beginning, we held targeted training sessions for various user groups, site managers and production planning staff with Delfoi. Delfoi has helped us every time we needed it, and communicating with them is very easy”, Säkkinen says.
A modern system makes it possible to manage the entire project better
Delfoi Planner’s benefits have quickly become evident at Merima. As Merima’s experience of using the system has increased, it has been able to adapt the system to better meet its needs. In the future, the plan is to also include the planners through the MES feature and to add all work hours and job queues of planning work to the system.
“The most important benefit is that we now have daily, weekly and monthly order backlog in one view, schdeuled and in order. This information used to be scattered, but now we have all the data in one system,” Säkkinen says. “In the future, as we receive more data from the system over time, we will be able to use Delfoi’s simulation solutions and be better able to think about things such as a factory’s lay-out and how the production would flow through various teams. Based on this, we can use virtual models to, for example, discover any bottlenecks and find out how to organise ourselves even better. Before, we were at the mercy of the production flow. Now we are in the driver’s seat and are able to say what is realistic when it comes to things like production schedules. We are able to prepare for additional orders and use facts to explain our views on production arrangements,” Säkkinen says.
“The most important benefit is that we now have daily, weekly and monthly order backlog in one view, schdeuled and in order. This information used to be scattered, but now we have all the data in one system,”
– Production Director Janne Säkkinen, Merima Oy
