Hulamin Selects Quintiq Software to Optimise Supply Chain

One of South Africa’s leading manufacturing businesses, Hulamin, has selected Quintiq, a global leader in supply chain planning and optimization, for its scheduling software platform.

With Quintiq, which has its headquarters in the Netherlands and the USA, Hulamin will sync production and planning for the entire supply chain across its hot-rolling, cold-rolling and finishing facilities.

By adding the scheduling capabilities, Hulamin can expect higher delivery performance, work-in-progress control, increased supply chain visibility and key performance indicator-driven (KPI) scheduling.

 Additionally, Hulamin will implement the Quintiq mobility server, which allows management to review KPIs on mobile devices and make decisions and changes in real-time.

 Hulamin has carved out a niche in the global aluminum rolled products market. It serves customers both locally and internationally across several market segments.

The company’s previous scheduling system was manually operated and lacked KPIs. With this system, a feasible schedule was simply “good enough,” which resulted in production bottlenecks, low delivery performance and a gap between order planning and execution.

In order to address the order planning and execution gap, Hulamin required an integrated scheduling solution for its hot and cold mills as well as multiple finishing lines.

 Quintiq’s reputation as a market leader in aluminum, coupled with the seamless integration of additional software platform capabilities at Hulamin in 2011 and 2006, made the company’s scheduling technology the perfect choice for a fully cohesive supply chain planning solution.

Lydia Gertenbach, Production Planning Manager at Hulamin, said: “We hosted a one-week demo challenge to evaluate our scheduling options.

 “Quintiq was able to configure its software platform to our unique constraints within the week, and it made a noticeable improvement to our schedules.

“The challenges addressed in the one-week demo challenge were recognisable to the team, which demonstrated the potential value that integrated scheduling can add.

“We’ll now have the supply chain visibility we need to meet the needs of our customers in South Africa and internationally.”

Koen Jacobs, Business Unit Director at Quintiq, said: “Our expertise in the metals market combined with our existing work with Hulamin equipped us to identify where the company could optimise operations in the hot and cold mills.

 “The decision to extend work with us validates the Quintiq offering and we look forward to continued success with Hulamin.”