TPi January 2012

f i t t ings & valves

Valve company plans for growth Velan Inc is a manufacturer of industrial valves, operating 13 plants in eight countries. The company has chosen Ortems to support its growth by maximising its operational excellence. production output reporting system from contract to customer delivery stage.

900mm PE pipe being installed solution with planning issues adapted to our markets with long cycles and 18-month horizon. “We also liked the tool’s thoroughness, which allows us to supervise our shifts closely, as well as the relationship of trust that formed between our companies.” René Desvignes, Ortems chairman and managing director, added, “This new signingwill strengthenOrtems’ leadership position in per-project management, which requires real planning expertise based on the workload/capacity match as well as a powerful load balancing functionality. “As the market leader, Velan’s choice demonstrates once again that our solutions’ flexibility and modelling power allow us to correctly address our customers’ complex core business issues in the engineering to order (ETO) process.”

Pierre Alain Eloy, head of project planning at Velan, explained, “Velan France specifically services the nuclear industry and liquefied gas market, which is subject to severe safety constraints that oblige our customers to check each part. “These constraints have a strong impact on our production lead-times. As such, between the run time, which often is only a week, and the final delivery, sometimes up to eight months can go by. Our objective with a planning tool is to do a better job of informing our customers in order to reduce these lead-times and thereby improve our productivity. “In order to choose the best solution, we worked early on with the SCA Consult firm, which helped us during the tendering phase and in choosing the best solution. We selected the Ortems solutions because they were the only ones that had a per-project management

Velan SAS France is a subsidiary of Velan Inc that specialises in the design, manufacture and maintenance of valves and taps for the nuclear and cryogenics industries. In light of its strong revenue growth (€35mn in 2008, €70mn in 2010 and €80mn forecast in 2011), Velan SAS France decided to acquire a planning and scheduling solution for several important reasons: to improve the visibility on project status and related forecast completion lead-time; to assess plant workload over several months based on order backlog and identify necessary CAPEX to drive its strong growth; to plan shop-floor operations by scheduling short and medium-term tasks to be carried out based on prioritisation criteria (urgency and importance of projects, optimisation of launches, etc); to assess subcontractor workloads and negotiate framework agreements with them; and to implement an easy

Velan sas – France www.velan.com

ortems – France info@ortems.com www.ortems.com

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