Chocolates Valor

Case Study

Chocolates Valor optimizes its production to maximize product quality and service level thanks to BlueSmart, driving the digitization of industrial processes of the company

The food industry is characterized by unique demands that, when combined, result in environments that make simple and manageable an impossible production planning and scheduling.

The BlueSmart team is adept at meeting challenges in the Food and Beverage sector, perfectly orchestrating raw material variation and short shelf life; strong customer pressure on prices; and complex quality and packaging requirements, all with the implementation of Preactor APS.

Thanks to the expertise of BlueSmart’s technical and functional team, today Chocolates Valor has become a new success story.

Master chocolatiers since 1881

Chocolates Valor was founded in 1881, as a result of the López family’s family chocolate tradition. Throughout its 130-year history, the factory and the business have never stopped growing, always with quality, differentiation and excellence as a strategy. Innovation and export are in his DNA, managing to create and manufacture new products and cross all frontiers.

How is Valor chocolate made? 

“We make endure a chocolate tradition of many years with a high quality product, accompanied by a manufacturing strategy based on obtaining excellence.”

Manufacturing process

  • Raw materials selection. Their secret is to choose the best cocoa beans in the world.
  • Blending. Once the best cocoa in the world has been selected, they mix it in the exact proportion following their centenary recipe.
  • Roasting and crushing. The clean seeds go to the toasters to purify it. Once purified, it is crushed to obtain nibs.
  • Blended and mixed. Turn the nibs into a paste. During the process it is mixed with cocoa butter, sugar and dairy products.
  • Refined. By means of refineries it is converted into very fine powder.
  • Conch. Chocolate paste transformation from solid to liquid.
  • Moulding. The paste is tempered and deposited in moulds that will shape the product.

Starting technological situation

Excel based on SAP ERP screenshots. They had great efforts to capture the data in the plant, consuming time and resources

The information with which they worked did not have the desired precision, so the decision making was not agile and efficient

Little visibility of the relationships between production processes, poor visibility of the supply chain

They needed to be more agile and precise when it came to sequencing production

Challenges

  • Capture data in plant in real time
  • Optimize manufacturing processes
  • Improve the visibility and transparency of the supply chain
  • Total and real-time control of all plant information, for optimization of manufacturing processes.
  • Lack of global vision of the production and its traceability. They needed to locate the possible problems of final product deliveries sufficiently in advance.
  • Use of limiting restrictions between resources
  • Data connection with SAP.
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Why Chocolates Valor chooses Preactor?

Since the production process is key to obtain an excellent product, they chose a digitizing solution in the production environment. Preactor APS is a family of solutions that allows to improve the synchronization of manufacturing processes and have greater visibility and control, fitting in with the company needs.

Preactor APS transforms the way companies produce and work, and with a successful implementation that means an immediate ROI.
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Success keys

  • Increase the level of customer service
  • Rely on BlueSmart expertise for the project
  • Visibility and transparency, the basis for good planning
  • Synchronized and optimized manufacturing processes
  • Thanks to Preactor implementation that BlueSmart did, they now sequence the OF’s with more speed, better planning precision, better updating of the manufacturing master plans and an improvement in the communication between departments.

Solution

Maximum flexibility to replan the production in case of unexpected and inconvenient

The plant vision has been globalized in a single scenario, with traceability from the raw material in stock or pending arrival, to each of the customer's orders

Use limitation between machines activity / lines for a greater work optimization

Thanks to the development of our Linktec tool, they can now create a data interface between SAP and Preactor via IDOCS, without the need for configuration by the client

The OF’s scheduling is a finite mode, obtaining a real vision of the bottlenecks or sections where to apply production improvements

Benefits and results

  • Faster production orders sequencing
  • Greater precision in production schedules
  • Better update of production master plans
  • Greater transparency, communication and collaboration between departments
  • Savings of 16 hours a week from the planner
  • Contribute to the improvement of customer service that went from 97.8% to 98.5%.
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“With Preactor APS we have won 16 hours per week of the planner resource to sequence productions” Jordi Barbero, Supply Chain Manager

Jordi Barbero, Supply Chain Manager

With world leading partner guarantee

More than 4,500 companies, located in more than 88 countries around the world, from SMEs to large corporations, use Preactor as their global supply chain solution.

The flexibility of Siemens technology and the knowledge and capacity of our professionals allow us to implement our solutions in practically any sector and type of industrial company.