Work-in-Progress Reduced by 15% with Operational Production Planning
| scale | 1,000 employees, 250+ users | kpi | Improving planning accuracy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product | Expenses and controlling | year of briefcase | 2002-2010 |
| geography | Ukraine | Industry | Mechanical engineering |
| customer | Kremenchuk Wheel Plant |
Project objectives
Kremenchuk Wheel Plant is a large industrial manufacturer of cold-formed steel wheels for passenger vehicles, trucks, buses and agricultural machinery.
The plant operates at enterprise scale, with an annual capacity exceeding 8 million wheels, and supplies both the Ukrainian market and European customers.
Before partnering with IT-Enterprise, the company had multiple isolated automation solutions covering logistics, accounting, HR and payroll. While these systems supported individual functions, they lacked a unified data model and required increasing effort to maintain and reconcile information across departments.
The management team set a clear objective:
to implement a single, integrated ERP platform for mechanical engineering, capable of supporting multi-product batch manufacturing, end-to-end production planning and centralized data governance.
Project Description
A key requirement of the project was to preserve and reuse the plant’s existing operational expertise, accumulated over years by the internal automation team.
IT-Enterprise integrated this groundwork into a unified ERP environment, ensuring continuity while eliminating fragmentation.
The implementation was delivered in phases, allowing the enterprise to achieve measurable results early while scaling the solution step by step.
Implementation scope
PDM, MPS and accounting
The introduction of product data management and master production scheduling enabled a dramatic expansion of the product range.
Minimum order size was reduced from 50,000 units to 500, while production costs were optimized through better planning accuracy.
Operational production planning and control
Detailed operational planning improved responsiveness to market demand.
Electronic document management was introduced as a foundation for a paperless production environment.
PLM (Product Lifecycle Management)
Time-to-market was reduced from 9 months to 4–5 months.
The company gained full visibility across product development and manufacturing stages.
PDM and PLM
PDM enabled structured planning of pre-production processes and ensured end-to-end control of technical documentation.
All engineering documentation was moved to a centralized digital archive, providing a single source of truth.
Shop-floor personnel now access up-to-date drawings online, with version control handled automatically by the IT-Enterprise system — a critical requirement for regulated, high-volume manufacturing.
Production activity control
Production planning is based on engineering bills of materials (EBOMs) aligned with shop-to-shop routings.
The solution supports multiple EBOM variants for the same product, reflecting real-world scenarios where components may be produced internally or sourced from suppliers.
The approved sales delivery plan is transformed into an MPS, followed by a detailed production plan and MES-level daily schedules.
Shift tasks, reporting and unit-based labor calculations are generated automatically, ensuring traceability from sales order to execution.
To address the realities of mass production, a parts tracking mechanism was implemented, providing accurate real-time visibility of work-in-progress across workshops without excessive manual reporting.
Key project results
- Work-in-progress reduced by 15%
- Production planning time reduced by 1.5×
Key project factors
Business impact
The plant implemented a fully integrated ERP platform covering production planning, engineering, product development, cost calculation, inventory management, sales, supply chain, accounting and HR.
Operational production planning shifted from reactive to data-driven.
As a result:
- time-to-market was reduced from 9 months to 4–5 months
- work-in-progress decreased by 10–15%
- sales responsiveness improved, supporting revenue growth
- production accounting accuracy increased while administrative workload decreased
The solution demonstrates how enterprise-grade ERP and operational planning, implemented in a large industrial environment in Ukraine, can be directly applied to European manufacturing companies seeking scalability, transparency and faster decision-making.