Agile workflows: COSSMA

Today’s cosmetics industry is facing rapidly changing challenges and requirements in a fast-moving B2B consumer goods market. As a result, beauty brands require utmost flexibility but also demanding customisation and variety options. Forecasting has lost importance due to the constantly shifting market and customer demands.

Being increasingly influenced by social media, customer behaviour can overturn planned requirements and delivery scenarios from one day to the other. From a production perspective, it is therefore key not only to manage these volatile circumstances, e.g., being prepared for small to large order quantities, but also making use of such challenges to increase competitiveness.

Acting rather than reacting

To be one step ahead and to meet or exceed customer needs, it is important to identify several strategic focus areas within the company’s strategy.
One of these focusses is ‘Agility’ with the main goal to identify and proactively address tomorrow’s market challenges by building new capabilities in the operations landscape.
During a two-and-a-half-year project phase, bottlenecks have been identified by running value stream analysis for each value-added process along the production line. A cross-functional team of experts used these results in combination with several case studies to develop and implement a new agile production methodology for a global operations network.

BFP system

The so-called ‘Batch-Flow Production System’ (BFP system) was introduced in April 2022. It enables to increase performance and effectivity while reducing lead times and minimum order quantities. This is key to a high-mix low-volume order portfolio – a common feature in an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) cosmetics environment.

To ensure uniform production cycles leading to constancy and stability within the production the BFP system is planning with defined batch sizes. One key benefit is a 25% lead-time reduction for large parts of the product portfolio. The Heijunka planning board, as one piece of the whole puzzle, helps to level fluctuating customer demands and establish a steady production flow. In addition, agile production teams have been implemented working with new standard routines such as SMED (= Single Minute Exchange of Die) to optimise setup times of machine and assembly lines.

“Driven by customer centricity, we have set the goal to become the benchmark for agility.”

Dagmar Chlosta, President Faber-Castell Cosmetics

Developing a competitive advantage

Nowadays, being able to adapt quickly to market changes is a prerequisite to stay at least on an equal footing with other companies. The days of static resource planning and standard operating procedures are long gone. Dynamic store floor management for faster processes and the ability to react to unforeseen events are becoming critical factors for successful manufacturing operations.

All in all, the advantages of agile production systems are obvious: increased production output, better workforce utilisation through a connected workforce, increased operational flexibility, lower production costs through reduced inventory levels, and increased customer satisfaction through improved quality and on-time delivery. That is the way to go.