The Project

Römheld & Moelle Eisengießerei GmbH

For the industry sector mechanical engineering- and automation equipment Römheld & Moelle Eisengießerei GmbH delivers single piece casting and small series parts, e.g. press tools, machining centre beds, very large milling machine base plates, special designed machine tool chassis parts and deep-drawing tools as well as castings for grinding machines, general machine tools, plastic injection molding machines and HPDC machines in size of 1t per piece up to 40t per piece and maximum 11m in length.

Customers in the tooling and pattern making equipment sector which R & M in the location of Mainz/Germany supplies are mostly automotive clients using very large tooling for deep drawings of sheet metal and similar applications.

For most clients R & M offers a complete technology solution via utilizing their CAD – data, create patterns prior to the casting process itself, manage total lost foam casting process design as well as  execution and all this done in timely fashion without delay.

Consequently the challenges towards logistics and co-ordination of producing machine tool castings are immense and the PPC system has to manage this process. The solution Römheld & Moelle Eisengießerei GmbH required from the FRP sytems was not only automatic generation of resource plans but also the automatic handling of production scheduling from incoming orders booked.

Römheld & Moelle Eisengießerei GmbH and RGU GmbH started the collaboration in 2002 via the implementation of the – at that time – available FRP – OPTI version and the required data exchange from the previous system. In 2004 and due to the increase in demands in the company operations the FRP / OPTI system was upgraded to the version 5.1. While this was happening  various newly developed solutions were implemented as well.

New to the environment at Römheld & Moelle Eisengießerei GmbH was the – at that time – improved sales-module covering now various innovative pricing structure templates combining master data and variable data related to piece price or price per kg. In addition various cost factors such min. lot size agreements and add-on discounts for timely shipping were able to be considered. Orders related to tooling parts were managed in a table format collection of data, which automatically generates the resource plan tree for all items in the manufacturing process. While implementing the new sales-module various administrative process steps were optimized as well.

Most important for Römheld & Moelle Eisengießerei GmbH was the ability for a qualified post-calculation with correct assignments to all cost centres via e.g. detailed considerations of any freight charges per item shipped.

With the ability of data capturing and feeding of this data into the costing calculation including considering actual consumption and timings additional controlling instruments were generated in order to check on the commercial success of the company.

Using an interface between FRP / OPTI and their Varial™ accounting system, allowed for detailed data transfer of planed data comparison with actual data via dedicated feedback stations. With this ability mission critical KPI’s were able to be established and compared.

Then in 2005 the maintenance and service planning module was integrated into the existing FRP / OPTI system. This maintenance and services planning module is part of the total FRP / OPTI system and fully integrated. It is used for detailed planning of all technical maintenance schedules of any equipment and able to monitor the frequency of such activity in order to avoid bottlenecks or any unplanned disruption and idle times.

After the release change to FRP / OPTI R18 in 2015 new enhanced functionalities were implemented as well. Among others the QM / QC package was completely revamped. Outcome of this revision was that for tooling castings the complete process chain of an order was utilized to generate quality certificates without any manual intervention. Then in 2016 a new functional concept was implemented for capacity reservations. Service and maintenance scheduling was further enhanced.

This new strategy for a production reservation system had the aim to achieve a higher degree of efficiency in capacity planning up to 6 weeks in advance.

For an easy and fast as well as simple solution of the order administration handling the following 3 steps are now used: