Case Study: Pentel achieves lower inventory and better due-date promises with Asprova

Pentel improves order due-date promise to 97–98% with Asprova

Pentel Corporation, a major Japanese manufacturer of stationery and industrial products, faced a challenge in its production planning. The process of creating monthly production plans manually was slow, taking approximately three days, and their previous in-house system was difficult to maintain and could not schedule quickly enough. To automate this process and achieve high-speed scheduling, Pentel turned to the vendor Asprova Corporation for its Asprova production scheduling software.

The solution implemented by Asprova automated the creation of production plans. After years of use and fine-tuning to meet factory requirements, Asprova was later integrated with a new SAP ERP system. This integration allowed for automatic data exchange. The results for Pentel were a dramatic decrease in inventory and a significant improvement in the promise of order due dates, achieving a rate of 97-98%. Furthermore, unshipped items were reduced by one-quarter to one-half. Asprova provided a critical scheduling function that the ERP system itself could not replace.

Pentel