Athena, Over 40 years of history
Athena was born as a small laboratory. Today the company has become an important global manufacturer and distributor of the automotive sector. Today Athena is an international group based in Vicenza and can boast over 40 years of history. The organisation has production and logistics facilities in Italy, Europe, Asia and South America. In 2018, it recorded a global turnover of over 140 million euros and 756 employees.
Athena is composed of 3 divisions with a single objective: to offer the market the best products built with solid know-how to perfectly meet the needs of each customer.
Athena’s needs
Athena competes every day in one of the most complex sectors, which is Automotive. Manufacturers, manufacturers of spare parts represent a highly competitive sector. To work successfully in this industry, you need to manage your entire supply chain meticulously, with a global perspective. Competition has expanded globally and is no longer limited to the Europe-America axis. To survive in this market it is necessary to have a strong integration within the supply chain and work in a regime of absolute punctuality and product quality. This is why Athena has chosen to invest in innovation and technology to implement a Digital Supply Chain project using the best IT solutions on the market.
The choice
A forward-looking company structure combined with the adoption of intelligent production tools are the perfect ingredients to simplify and optimize work. In other words, an organization that chooses the right technologies can successfully overcome economic crises, maintaining perfect control of its production performance, but above all it can stand out and aim for operational excellence. Athena chooses Opera MES for the production process control part and Cyberplan APS for the advanced production planning and scheduling part.
Thanks to the implementation of OperaMES and CyberPLan, Athena is now able to:
- Plan and finalize the scheduled times thanks to CyberPlan APS.
- Distribute workload and processes across multiple work centers, providing a rapid response to customer needs and achieving excellent responsiveness to workloads.
- Collect real-time data related to testing and quality control activities and share it with quality software
- Increase customer satisfaction.
- Check production results to minimize costs and check orders.
- Save a huge amount of work in collecting manual production data, using interactive operator web station.
Tangible benefits for Athena
The joint use of the CyberPlan APS and Opera MES tools allows Athena to record important, tangible benefits, which then allow it to improve over time. Measure the performance of the production process to constantly improve. On the APS side, production plans are optimised and realistic thanks to the integration with the MES part that provides and displays updated data in real time. The main benefits recorded are:
- Improvement of machinery activity from 55% to 80%.
- Production efficiency increased from 80% to 94%.
- More accurate KPIs that can be updated in real time.
- Simplification of packaging operations
- Implementation of the Lean model to efficiently manage all orders
- Reduction of packaging costs.
Athena is a high-value company that has been able to invest in the IT infrastructure to support the entire production process, from advanced production planning to real-time control of the entire production process, digitizing information and providing production operators with interactive web workstations for the advancement of production. Performance proves its effectiveness every day. But Athena does not stop, but continues its path of digitization and continuous improvement thanks to the punctual and constant support of the project implementing partner, Link Management.