Cape Gate, SA`s largest privately owned steel mill, has contracted PQ Africa`s Tetra division for the installation and roll-out of an advanced planning and scheduling (APS) system from UK-based Preactor at its head office and factory in Cape Town.
Founded in 1929, Cape Gate has established itself as a market leader in the steel industry and its associated lines of business. The company owns manufacturing facilities in major cities throughout SA, including Port Elizabeth, Durban and Johannesburg, and has active interests offshore in the UK and Israel. It controls the full production cycle - from raw material to finished product - servicing almost every industry sector from retail and manufacturing to building, entertainment and heavy industry.
Cape Gate`s portfolio covers most categories of commercial and industrial steel products, from shopping trolleys (30 varieties) to wire fencing, plastic-coated wire, nails, point-of-sale stands, conveyor belting, cable trays, garden and lawn borders, real estate signage stands and rugby posts. It is also the sole South African distributor and manufacturer of Swedish-based System Elfa office products.
"The South African market is too small to sustain our production capacity; 25% of our turnover is export-related, mostly to the US, and we would like to grow this percentage even more," says production director Etienne Roux.
"Also, because we have so many products in so many different categories, we have competition from various specialist and small-scale companies for most of our ranges. As a result we stay away from small-volume or customised production, for which we can`t be price-competitive, and focus instead on the mass production of our products for local and overseas buyers."
Until recently, the manufacturing processes for all products was planned, scheduled and run using a manual spreadsheet system, making it difficult to predict and react to production bottlenecks such as machine failures and resource shortages.
"For some time now we`ve been scoping the market for a reliable automated planning and scheduling system to help us maximise our production efficiency," says Roux.
"Take for example a shopping trolley, which is manufactured at seven production `cells` in the factory before being assembled as the final product. If there is a problem with one or more cells, we`d have no way of knowing exactly how the final customer order will be affected, or how the delay will impact on other products - with their own processes - elsewhere in the factory."
Roux says Preactor - supplied exclusively by PQ Tetra - came out tops on features and price. "Preactor has a view of every job on the factory floor, tracking stock and individual processes, assigning resources to each process and scheduling the optimal production run for each product based on the resources available and the priority of the jobs in progress," says PQ Tetra divisional manager Stephen Howe.
"At a glance the production team can see how far each job has progressed, when and where bottlenecks occur and how they will affect current and future production runs. What`s more, Preactor automates production scheduling, irrespective of the number of separate processes for each product, so if, for example, a machine goes down in one cell of a trolley production run, Preactor can automatically assign available resources to complete the job and make sure other jobs running concurrently finish on time."
"The biggest advantage of the system," says Roux, "is faster and more reliable turnaround for our customers. Preactor will also help us reduce production inefficiencies, boost productivity, and optimise our resources for maximum competitive advantage."
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