A true Story

The beginning of OptimaInsert lies a few years back. A larger printing house in the Berlin area received a new order.
The team around the production manager, let’s call him Tom, was to produce a free weekly newspaper with a circulation of over 1.53 million copies per week on two new inserting lines with 18 feeders each.
To make it even more sophisticated, there were 33 local editions. Within one production, about 6.0 million inserts were to be inserted. In the year, the total number of inserts was over 250 million. There was a window of just 33 hours to produce the entire job.
Tom analyzed the production data and quickly found more startling facts about the new production. There were to be 37 different inserts plugged in. This resulted in 330 different combinations and up to 11 inserts running simultaneously.
Since Tom was a savvy PC user, he immediately began planning with a spreadsheet program. It couldn’t be that hard! It quickly became apparent that planning over the entire production period meant a very, very large amount of work, and if there were even the smallest errors, they could start all over again. Since different inserts have to run on certain feeders due to their weight or format, this made the task even more difficult. Tom’s team was under enormous pressure before each production, as there were only a few hours available for planning.
During the first productions, it quickly became apparent that the planned schedule was soon nothing more than wastepaper. People started planning as far as they could, stopped production and planned for the next few hours. This did not correspond to the production schedule and effort envisaged by the printing facility management.
In some cases, the production target was missed by 24 hours. Everyone can work out that the actual costs significantly exceeded the planned costs. Tom’s team was at times in despair. They did not want to work like this for the next months and years.
Tom, as a person with an affinity for technology, was sure that only software-supported planning could steer this production on a successful course.

There was this new software “OptimaInsert” which promised to solve all his problems. Tom organized the software and was able to achieve the required time and quality targets right from the start due to the intuitive program.
The very next day he gathered his colleagues and showed them the solution to their problem. Within less than an hour, the planning for production was done.
The success of the software was so convincing, however, that Tom and his team were rewarded with a bonus from the faciliy’s management. Thanks to the new software, line output increased by an average of 3,800 copies per hour while the waste rate was reduced. Production time was reduced by five hours per line. The planning phase finally amounted to 30 minutes and no longer several hours.
Subsequently, many suggestions from practical operation were integrated in the further developed versions of OptimaInsert. Today, Tom can no longer imagine order and machine planning without OptimaInsert.