5IMPORTANT FACTS ABOUT PREACTOR

The Preactor integration is certified by SAP®.

WORLD LEADER

Preactor ® is the world's leading advanced planning and scheduling product. More than 3,500 companies across almost every manufacturing and services sector are users of Preactor.

UNEQUALED RECORD

Preactor has been field proven - a solution continuously in the market since 1993 with over 10,000 installs in companies located in 69 countries. It is available in more than 30 languages.

FAST ROI

Preactor has demonstrated a return on investment that can be measured in weeks. Fast deployment keeps services cost to a minimum.

STANDARD INTEGRATION

Preactor uses SAP’s most advanced technology, SAP NetWeaver ®, to provide close integration with SAP ® ERP. The link is SAP ® certified.

ADDED CAPABILITIES

Preactor’s standard functional-ity provides users of the SAP ® ERP PP/DS module with an interac-tive detailed scheduling decision support tool and intelligent attribute based sequencing engine for example to minimize changeovers in the scheduling horizon.

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GLOBAL COMPETITIONThe current trends in manufacturing are aimed at lowering inventory levels to reduce costs, while still being able to respond to shorter lead times and thereby satisfy customer demand. This forces companies to find ways to optimize production operations by reducing or eliminating non-value-added activities such as setup or waiting time. Highlighting potential problems allows action to be taken to balance demand and capacity.

Preactor has been developed over 20 years to meet this need. It is used by small companies, mid-size and large corporations to help meet demands made by their customers and beat the increasingly global competition.

WORKING WITH SAP® ERPPreactor has a standard adapter for integration with SAP® ERP which is available for SAP Netweaver users as well as .NET applications.

Demand data such as sales and manufacturing orders held in SAP® ERP is passed to Preactor together with routing and Bill of Materials. The planner can then generate the schedule using standard or customized scheduling rules and then release this back to SAP®. SAP® then uses the information to drive the shop floor and update the ERP system.

Operation progress (start and finish times or mid-batch updates) can be collected and passed automatically back to synchronize the current status of the schedule. Calendar exceptions such as unplanned maintenance can also be supplied to update Preactor so that changes in capacity and the impact on completion times for all orders can then be assessed and action taken where required.

The adapters can be customized to the exact requirements of the application.

VISIBILITY IS THE KEYYou need to see the impact of your decisions. This cannot be achieved with more generalized tools, such as a spreadsheet. Preactor helps to:

• visualize the current load;• see the impact of unexpected events;• ask ‘what if ’ questions;• compare alternatives;

and all before the decision is made.

WHO USES PREACTOR?Preactor’s flexibility means that it can be used by companies with SAP® in almost every sector of manufacturing, services and logistics.

• Aircraft, Aircraft Components & • Automotive Engines

• Bakeries & Snack Foods

• Beverages & Dairy Products

• Complex Engineering

• Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals

• Furniture & Household Appliances

• Metals and Metal Fabrications

• Printing & Packaging

• Oil & Gas Production Parts

• Printed Circuit Boards

• Production Tooling

• Tyres & Rubber Products

Preactor for SAP®

Advanced Scheduler for SAP® ERPInstalled by more than 3,500 companies in 69 countries around the world.

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TESTIMONIALS

EUROCOPTER

“Each of the individual areas Preactor currently manages 45,000 parts that constraints are applied to. We are today able to schedule each aircraft in detail with 70% of each assembly included. SAP is the reference point for all data. PREACTOR optimizes the schedule and feeds the information back to SAP. Its powerful scheduling engine complements the SAP system”.

Francis Bonlieu, Manager

VALLOUREC

“The investment was a very modest one yet not only have we vastly improved our delivery performance but also cut out stocks of raw material and finished product by half. Our payback period more than met our expectations”.

Arnaud Haquin, Logistics Manager

KLABIN"Preactor gave us a fast

scheduling response allowing the creation of alternative scenarios which has enabled us to control all stages of the production process - from the customer order by date, through choice of production lines, until the release of the product for the customer."

Antonio Andrucioli, Commercial Director

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CASE STUDY ‒ EUROCOPTERThe EUROCOPTER group is formed from the merger of aviation enthusiasts. The activity started at the beginning of the last century with the placing on the market of the first rotary wing aircraft. Over many years the Group has developed. In 2000 the Group AEROSPATIALE (France) and Deutsche Chrysler AEROSPACE (Germany) merged to create EADS which now has production plants in France, Germany and Spain. EUROCOPTER is a wholly owned subsidiary of EADS, in the same way as Airbus and Astrium and is a world leader in helicopter manufacturing.

Francis BONLIEU became responsible for the DAUPHIN line improvement group three years ago. Its mission was to review all of the DAUPHIN manufacturing processes and significantly reduce the assembly cycle times. This line has suffered from lack of investment and needed to be upgraded to promote the DAUPHIN and maintain its competitiveness in anticipation of its successor.

He maintains that it is impossible to follow Lean Manufacturing without a powerful scheduling solution. "Thanks to Preactor we have been able to implement ‘pull’ and not ‘push’ manufacturing. With 20 aircraft types the level of complexity involved was too much to do in the head or use Excel. Also we wanted to formalize our scheduling solution and not rely on the expertise of a single person".

During the scheduling process Preactor recognises those operations that are waiting for parts and sequences them as late as possible without affect-ing the promised delivery dates for its customers. When a part is missing Preactor moves the opera-tion to meet the deadlines and a visual indicator appears within SAP® alerting the users to the situation. The head of the workshop can then take the decision to use the same part from another aircraft type.

The planning horizon is set to about 4 weeks. Preactor is used to validate the data and highlight errors in SAP®. The schedule data is then released to the workshops via a server where it can be accessed by all the team heads in an appropriate format that they could use.

"Preactor is very powerful. We began by putting into the scheduling model the essential constraints of our production system, then, as we made measurements of the actual results, we made adjustments. We divided the shop into areas or departments, then, taking into account the skills of the operators, we assign them to specific areas and specific tasks in the schedule. The aim is to reduce unnecessary movement from one area to another".

CUSTOMIZATION Preactor is world-renowned as the most customizable capacity planning and schedul-ing package available on the market. Fields and data tables in its Microsoft® SQL 2005 database can be added or changed. Unique sequencing rules can be created. Event driven communication scripts can be installed for tight integration with other systems across multiple sites. Its flexibility is unparalleled.

Preactor can be configured in a number of different ways. Often, users have a single master scheduling system that communi-cates with one or more Preactor Viewers to share schedule information. Conversely, other companies employ multiple licenses across one or more departments, units or plants, with an automatic transfer of information from one system to another.

CONTACT DETAILSPreactor International LtdCornbrash Park Bumpers Way ChippenhamWiltshireUnited KingdomSN14 6RA

Tel: +44 (0) 1249 650316Web: www.preactor.comEmail: sales@preactor.com

Preactor is a registered trademark of Preactor International Limited. Microsoft is a registered trademark of the Microsoft Corporation. SAP is the registered trademark of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS?There are more than 150 case studies that illustrate how Preactor can help compa-nies become both more competitive in their market and more successful in their sector. These quantifiable benefits have often provided a ROI measurable in weeks; some in just a few days. These benefits are proven to continue year after year.

• 15-20% Improvement in productivity ‒ get more from what you already have

• 40-50% Reduction in raw materials inventory ‒ synchronize purchasing with an achievable schedule

• 40-50% Reduction in make-span time ‒ reduce WIP that slows down production flow

• 50-90% Improvement in customer service ‒ increase on-time deliveries