If the progressive and constant reduction in the size of production batches has made process efficiency the discriminating element to maintain the competitiveness of small and medium-sized jobshops, the vertical integration guaranteed by digitalisation and by Industry 4.0 native systems can only offer further margins of improvement. An advantage that does not go unnoticed in the jobshop industry, characterised as it is by a growing turnover rate of codes per shift. In order to meet this need for integration between office and factory environments, Salvagnini has developed OPS, a modular software solution able to connect ERP and CAM to each other.

"In 2014 we started a review of our order management and planning activities, with the aim of eliminating redundant and non-value added activities, but also of reducing lead time by at least 50%," claims Stefano Busolo, Plant Operations Manager of Tecnolaser SRL. "For each department involved we have broken down the micro-activities, evaluating the working times and the related waiting times, the input/output of each phase and the buffers detected. Once we had completed the mapping, we were literally breathless: for an actual production of about 6 hours we had a delivery time of 4 and a half days."

It is at this point that OPS Salvagnini came into play, with the office, report and machine modules: the first package made it possible to direct the activities from order to programming, even if the order execution time was changed; the second two to get feedback directly from the machines involved in the production processes and to transfer any program changes in a simple and quick way.

"Once the installation was completed, we ran the data again: the actual production times settled on 101 minutes, with a reduction of 70%; but, above all, OPS Salvagnini has allowed us to reduce waiting times and to bring our lead time to less than 3 hours, with a reduction of 95%. The novelty of the system's approach, however, is not only in eliminating non-value added activities or reducing delivery times; it is above all in being ‘fail-safe’, an aspect difficult to quantify in economic and temporal terms. Process automation excludes both code entry errors and errors related to processing incorrect materials. Quality, or perhaps I should say non-quality, is a black hole that sucks up all sorts of things and the solution is often not within everyone's reach: creating a system that prevents non-compliance from occurring is extremely desirable. Obviously this is a result well beyond our expectations, which has left us speechless," concludes Busolo.