At Meccanostampi, scheduling is not an ancillary activity: it is the engine that aligns people, equipment and priorities to meet the delivery date required by the customer. That is why we have structured the scheduling of our two BUs, “Moldmaking ” and “Molding,” in an integrated way.
Today we operate with a multi-project management platform for tooling (design, construction, mold testing, and sample control) and an advanced planning and scheduling system (APS) for molding departments. The goal is one: optimize all resources, technical, human, and plant, and give customers reliability on dates.
From manual coordination to finite capacity scheduling
Until recently, progress monitoring in mold making was done manually, with periodic reviews together with department managers and experience-based estimates to predict deliveries. This approach, while based on great expertise, limited visibility into a portfolio of parallel job orders.
With the introduction of finite-capacity multi-project management, every task, from design to testing to sampling, is planned considering actual loads and resource availability. In practice, the system distributes work across production assets in an optimized manner, respecting priorities and delivery constraints.
In parallel,integration with business systems ensures unity of data (plans, actuals, KPIs) and allows the effect of a change on the entire order book to be read in real time. Result: less uncertainty, more control, quick decisions.
End-to-end control of the mold order
What, specifically, changes for the BU “Mould Construction”?
Real-time progress. Each phase-design, construction, testing, sampling-is consuntivated directly on planned activities. The data is no longer “a posteriori”: it is native, traceable and comparable with the estimate.
Reliability on deliverables. Date adherence is monitored continuously: the system highlights deviations between budget and actual and supports dynamic rescheduling when constraints or priorities change.
Simulated forecasts, not just estimated. Delivery forecasts arise from scheduling: technicians’ experience remains critical in setting standard times, but it is the tool that cross-references activities, loads, and dependencies to return the most realistic date, managing alternatives and urgencies.
To enable this qualitative leap, we worked on key steps:
- Analysis of processes intended for scheduling and calculation of available capacity.
- Distinction between scheduled and non-scheduled processes (activities that commit resources but do not directly contribute to mold making), so as to avoid “noise” in the plan.
- New hour record keeping, with clear “containers” to reduce errors and facilitate timekeeping; staff training on procedures and tools.
The results: punctuality, simplicity, visibility
Adoption of the new model has generated concrete and measurable benefits:
Sharply increasing punctuality. The rate of meeting delivery dates increased from ~50% to ~90% in about two years. The parallel introduction of structured project management practices also contributed to this result.
Operational simplification. Time recording for staff has been streamlined (with reduction/elimination of errors typical of the previous system), and automatic time tracking for work centers ensures consistent and timely data.
More reliable forecasts. We can run delivery simulations based on historical data for the past three years, segmenting by product family and mold type. Multi-job planning becomes more robust and improves critical resource allocation.
Why it all matters to our clients
- Delivery date as a commitment, not an estimate. Finite-capacity planning turns a promise into an executable plan, with objective checkpoints.
- Resource optimization. The right people, the right machines, at the right time: less downtime, fewer bottlenecks, lower risk of delay.
- Responsiveness to change. Urgencies, priorities, unforeseen events: integrated scheduling enables rapid rescheduling without losing sight of the whole.
A look beyond: data, method, continuous improvement
Planning is one piece of our integrated approach-fromlistening and co-design to mold making and mass molding-with a data-driven approach and continuous improvement. We turn complexity into visibility, and visibility into reliability.
If you want to learn more about how we set up plans and resources on your project, let’s start with shared feasibility-that‘s where dates become results.
Meccanostampi. Where ideas take shape.
