LiSEC Dynopt is used by Gethke Glas to optimize its operations
With LiSEC Dynopt, Gethke Glas has handed over glass optimization tasks, with consequent reductions in employee work time, delivery time, and cutting time.
With more than 180 employees, the Gethke Glas Group generates sales of more than EUR 30 million at three locations in Germany. The product range includes insulating glass, float glass, cast glass, safety glass, all-glass doors and fittings, sliding glass door systems and glass canopy systems. The company, which is still family-owned, was founded in 1959 by Richard Gethke. In 1971, the flat glass handling plant in Gronau was expanded to include an insulating glass production with an insulating glass system from LiSEC – this was the start of the cooperation between Gethke Glas and LiSEC. In 2017, the Gronau-based company produced 438,000 m² of insulating glass, of which one third was triple insulating glass.
Before using LiSEC Dynopt, glass processors at Gethke Glas made about ten optimizations per day with an average of six types of glass per optimization. Two to three sheets of them contained a remnant plate, resulting in between 20 and 30 residues per day. When optimizing orders in Planning and Scheduling, employees tried to avoid remnant plates as far as possible. For example, they looked for suitable orders to improve the glass yield or they disassembled remnant plates and assigned them to manual cutting.
Since the implementation of Dynopt, the LiSEC optimization tool for cutting, employees in Planning and Scheduling no longer pay attention to remnants or disassemble them, but pass on everything 1:1 to dynamic optimization: the optimization task is entirely taken over by LiSEC Dynopt.
Gethke Glas optimizes up to three days of delivery in advance – which means that there are always enough glass sheets to join them together. The employees keep track of glass sheets by means of labels which are printed for each dynamically optimized sheet. The label shows the corresponding production run number, the position, the dimension and the storage space. So the sheets can be easily assigned to the (actual) production run, even on the next day.
When Gethke Glas had broken sheets or heavily soiled or scratched glass sheets in the past, the staff wrote a remake note with detailed information on the respective glass sheet (dimension, type of glass, production line etc.) and sent these glass sheets to manual glass cutting.
Thanks to GPS-Ident (the so-called Remake Pool, where all remakes are collected and processed) combined with Dynopt, the process described above has become completely redundant.
Now defective sheets are scanned, immediately sent to the Remake Pool and then processed as fast as possible in Dynopt. With the extension “ Re-Opt“ on the cutting table, Dynopt optimizes a glass sheet once the cutting process has already been started or remakes are inserted. Thus a sheet subject to a complaint can be returned to production in no time.
Here too, the employees keep track of sheets via labels that are printed for each remake sheet. The associated run number, the position, the dimensions and the storage space as well as the line on which the remake order was generated, are printed on the label.
With Dynopt, the company saves about 1.5 employees in manual cutting. In fact, thanks to the fact that remakes as well as disassembled remnant plates are processed via Dynopt, this manual cutting system is now only used for cutting work for the grinding department. This cutting system is now used only half a shift a day (previously two full shifts).
There is also an improved overview of daily production in the cutting department, thus easier planning of overtime, reinforcement of staff, etc.
Moreover, employees in glass purchasing at Gethke Glas also use Dynopt as a support for order planning for basic glass.