Case Study

Introduction

The packaging market, valued at $1 trillion, is experiencing rapid growth due to the rise of e-commerce, a cultural shift towards sustainability, and technological advancements that enable more robust and versatile packaging solutions.

Zaleco SRL, a European industrial service provider, delivers smart engineered packaging solutions across various markets, including automotive, telecom, electronics, and furniture. By leveraging advanced packaging engineering, they provide bespoke, sustainable solutions quickly and at scale, significantly reducing time to market. Headquartered in Oradea, Romania, Zaleco is strategically located with several road and air connections to Western Europe, ensuring fast and efficient delivery of goods and services.

Scaling up production capacity to meet increased demand

Over 90% of Zaleco’s solutions are customized to enhance safety, reduce costs, and optimize capacity, while minimizing inventory, space, and complexity in their customers’ warehouses. However, increased demand highlighted new risks and limitations such as avoidable downtime, communication gaps, limited access to real-time information, and production reporting issues.

Zaleco products can be specially designed for each of their customers, so they needed a solution just as flexible as their operations. Tulip was not only easy to adapt quickly but also a scalable solution that enhances both operations and operator capabilities. Through digitalizing their processes with human-centric applications, Zaleco can maintain their high quality standards, continue to increase production, and scale their business.

Zaleco ensures perfect execution and gains real-time production visibility

Alin Salagean, leading the IT/OT Team at Zaleco, has brought value across several touchpoints in their manufacturing process with Tulip. Here's what they built:

Digital Work Instructions

The team gave operators applications referencing PDF files with work instructions, images, and videos, providing just-in-time information to execute tasks perfectly. Clear visual aids helped new operators ramp up and be more productive faster. Zaleco also reduced the chance of human error with built-in data validation steps to ensure all fields have been entered and documented correctly before allowing operators to proceed to the next step.

Quality Inspection

With the flexibility to deploy Tulip apps anywhere in production, Alin saw opportunities to reduce the cost of quality by integrating inspections into the manufacturing process. Operators can review work orders and product genealogies in real time, empowering them with information to make the best judgment. If a defect is detected, operators can compare their product with documented images of defective parts and confirm with the associated reason codes. This not only standardizes the process, but also gives Zaleco high-quality data to build Pareto charts and conduct investigations to eliminate future quality issues.

Production Management

Alin also designed a custom dashboard to track key production data, enhancing his ability to manage operations. With real-time access to these data feeds Alin can make more informed decisions and respond faster to observed issues to drive efficiency and productivity in their frontline operations.

Results

Since implementing Tulip, Zaleco has seen remarkable improvements in key performance indicators:

1. Scrap Rate: In just two months, real-time tracking enabled Zaleco to reduce scrap rates by an impressive 20%

2. Operational Availability: Increased by at least 30% through improved downtime management and efforts to minimize disruptions when they occur

3. Productivity: Zaleco achieved double-digit cycle time improvements through process optimization, the use of work instructions, and in-line quality checks.

Conclusion

With a 20% reduction in scrap rates and a 30% increase in operational availability, Zaleco has demonstrated how simple targeted interventions to drive in-line quality, track production metrics and downtime can have a significant positive impact on overall operational efficiency.. Using a flexible and customizable set of Tulip apps designed and maintained by their own process engineers makes it easier for Zaleco to update and adapt to new packaging requirements, thus enabling them to serve their customers more effectively.

Looking ahead, Zaleco plans to integrate more processes into Tulip’s composable platform, including material handling, maintenance processes, additional quality procedures, and Frontline Copilot™, a generative AI assistant for operators. This ongoing digital transformation positions Zaleco to meet evolving packaging requirements and continue delivering exceptional value to its customers.