Webinar - Performance improvement of process industries (in French)

Flying blind in a V-shaped plant?

Metals, steel, foundries, plastics, chemicals: these industries share the same production pattern, where few raw materials enter the plant only to leave it in many different forms. This is what we call a V-shaped plant.

This structure imposes constraints that cannot easily be worked around. Equipment is expensive, and capacity decisions commit the company for the long term, while inflexible resources struggle to adapt to demand variations. 

Classical approaches such as MRP, designed for forecasting, quickly reach their limits when faced with this complexity.

To amortize heavy investments, production then runs in large batches, which inflates inventories and erodes agility. 

The paradox becomes glaring: warehouses full of products nobody is asking for, while the references customers actually want go out of stock.

What can be done when complexity hides the real problems? Stopping flying blind first requires learning to read your flows. Clarifying what moves through the plant and locating the true points of tension means understanding your factory's dynamics. Capacity decisions, batch sizes and, ultimately, customer service levels all flow from this reading.

What you will learn in this webinar:

• Make the flows of a V-shaped plant visible
• Identify the true bottlenecks
• Make capacity investment decisions with greater confidence
• Cope with inflexible resources without being forced into large batches
• Restore maintenance to its rightful place in flow performance
• Gain agility in the way you steer your plant

The objective:

Lower inventories and a better service level, without permanent firefighting.