Questions:

 1. What are the characteristics of the markets where Edentel is competing? How is Edentel
competing? How well? What are its main strengths, weaknesses and prob-lems? 
2. What are in your opinion the critical success factors to achieve its strategy? 
3. What would you recommend them to do? 
Let us now look at the (B) case, which provides a particular example on which to test our ideas: 
4. Is it feasible to deliver all the orders in the specified delivery dates? Do we need to use some of
the “allowable” delays? Which ones? 
(Recommendation: Do not consider the costs, optimizing this schedule is very difficult!) 
 
Tips:
I am not sure if you were able to get the B case of Edentel. In any case, as a recommendation do not
try to consider the costs that are mentioned in the case, this makes optimization very difficult. Just
consider the question of whether everything fits, or if you need to make an adjustment to the
schedule (without cost consideration). 
 
Markets
 Volatile environment - textile manufactures
 Location: Masnou region in the province of Barcelona
 Fashion industry: placing the customer at the core, offering designs in small batches
(“true prototypes,” he called them) which, if successful, would later be manufactured in large
batches in record time
 change and adaptation are everything
 
company/process info:
 Edentel was a company that manufactured specialty textiles.
 worked on an order-by-order basis
 Each product had always required special treatment and often had to be
manufactured according to a customer’s very detailed specifications
 Email and phone orders (before):
 The company would review the feasibility of the delivery times and inform the
customer of any changes;
 Most customers specified a single date for the delivery of the whole order (Shipping
Department had to hold back several items and wait until everything was ready)
 Orders sorted by product, and a file was created for each order in a database which
contained the complete order book
 Online platform: customers could specify and change all the details of their orders
online
 Regular customer: Sales Department accepted the order immediately, usually under
the conditions specified by the customer
 Non regular: system itself notified the Sales Department, which checked the
customer’s existence and location. A customer file was started and the payment
procedures were negotiated (experimenting with credit card - high degree of
flexibility and better guarantee of payment, but high processing cost)
  Electronic orders went straight into this file, without any need for manual keying
 Sales assigned a particular level of urgency (based on different criteria, such as
delivery date, type of customer, etc.) and then reviewed it on a daily basis
 Weekly, the head of Programming, reviewed the urgency levels of all pending orders
and drew up a production plan for the following week
 
Sequential production process:
Set-up Excess capacity
manufacturing 1000 machines, divided into 4 product categories, 250 machines that
processed about 25% of the production each
finishing Excess capacity
 
 normal to assign several machines to work on one order at the same time
 most orders did not require many machine hours, so the proportion of machines
working on any one order was relatively small, and at any given time there were usually a large
number of orders in production 
 
Strengths
 large number of domestic and international customers
 one of the industry’s foremost manufacturers in Spain
 Its Engineering Department was capable of designing and manufacturing almost any
product, as long as it had the appropriate machinery
 Internationalization
 New machines (last 20): could be monitored remotely and needed less changeover
time
 Logistics: port and airport of Barcelona offered a wide range of services, in terms of
delivery they can meet customer needs
 
Weaknesses
 machines had very low unit production rates: long tooling times were required to
manufacture a specific product, although later this was partially offset by the fact that the machines
could operate virtually unattended
 machines were essentially interchangeable within each subdivision, which allowed a
specific product to be processed by any number of machines within that subdivision; however, this
interchangeability was not possible from one subdivision to another.
 The machines’ productivity within a given division was not always homogenous for
the same kind of fabric
 
Problems
 Meeting delivery dates (before online: offering delivery dates that were scrupulously
met)
 Priorities have to modified every day
 number of customers who made changes to their orders at the last minute had
recently increased
 customers often change their minds about the urgency of their orders
 we’re the last in the chain, and these changes seem to be much more damaging to
us than to the others
 The kind of product manufactured also influenced some machines’ performance.
The IT Department treated all the machines the same, since even though they varied considerably,
these variations had not been important until now.
 High sazonality - customers with collections: delivery dates tended to be
concentrated around the months of June–July and January–March, in other months there might not
even be enough to keep all the machines occupied
 Things are changing: businesses constantly launching new products, we were getting
smaller orders than before, but throughout the entire season
 Production Department had little control over production start-up and delivery
dates (customer decision)
 Every day major changes were made to the structure of the production order file for
a variety of reasons
 completion of manufacturing orders had to be taken into consideration
 delays due to disruptions in production
 Changes in orders priorities
 Urgent changes were made every day after the order database had been updated
and reviewed by the Sales Department first thing every morning - disrupted the daily production
program, hard to manage priorities
 In some cases, production of another less urgent order would be interrupted to
allow the the urgent order to go into production. changing the priorities of orders that are already in
production leads to disruptions that lead to a high cost per changeover and an extremely dangerous
drop in productivity
 Product changeover costs:
 Loss of discarded material
 Downtime due to set-up of thread creels, etc
 Expert attention time (15 employees - constantly busy, caused production
bottleneck, difficult to add new staff due to lack of skilled labor)
 Staff had to stay overtime
 With so many orders on the books and so many machines available, it was
increasingly difficult for one person to keep the whole structure of priorities in their head
  ERP (enterprise resource planning) program: maintenance of order files and basic
production files, but no integrated production application that could help with operational decisions
 
Strategy
 Possible strategies to alleviate the problem, so the customer wouldn't cancel the
order:
 delivering part of the yardage early and delaying another part
 delivering a given product early while delaying another one
 possibility of making staggered deliveries (to a customer that hadn’t requested it)
 find a balance between meeting delivery dates and the cost of having to make
frequent changeovers in the machines
 Possible Recommendations:
 Buy production app to sequence their production – they estimated it was
too complicated for Edentel
 invest in solutions with artificial intelligence
 invest in new automated machines – what to do with the old ones?
 Palou was not convinced that the solution to his problems could be found in
the new technologies, due to the volatility of the work it was difficult to establish a series of
decision-making rules and criteria that could allow an application to be used, and to lack of money
and time to “teach” a machine