When Mr. Andreas Heinzmann from SCHULER visited OPTIMA kitchen the 1st time in 2005 I knew only a bit about this company. I heard that they are a Germany consulting company in the HOMAG Group and that they worked for some companies in China like Qingdao Haier, Shenzhen Hinglee, Dongguan Fortune Furniture or Ningbo Colorful.
I knew that we needed to do optimization in the production flow but also in the internal organization, workplace arrangement, quality management and other fields to make the whole process more efficient. We bought a lot of high tech European equipment during the last years but our organization was still far behind to meet the requirements of a continuously growing furniture company who wants to produce high quality products.
SCHULER the world leading Consulting and Software Company for the international furniture industry was already during this time a potential partner for us and we believed that we could benefit a lot, but we were not yet ready for cooperation. Our old buildings allowed us only limited improvements and the clear goal was also to keep investment in the old factory as low as possible because there was already a plan to move to a new plant.
After OPTIMA made in 2007 the decision to build a completely new factory for kitchen cabinets and solid wood as well as high gloss lacquered kitchen doors in the near future we contacted SCHULER again and started long term cooperation.
We came to an agreement and started working for the project to design the production line for the new factories. I was really impressed how professional the German SCHULER engineers are working.
Mr. Dirk Post the project manager did first of all a very detailed analysis of our products to calculate and specify the necessary equipment and then worked out a detailed layout with optimized production flow for 200,000 kitchen sets per year.
We finished this layout project but for us the cooperation was not finished. It is really important that after the machines are moved into a new factory with a good layout that also the people are trained in a sufficient way to make sure that everybody is working according to the new organization ideas and the layout.
After OPTIMA moved into the new factory we were able to produce about 500 kitchens per day in the new facility. SCHULER provided now to us the very experienced SCHULER production consultant Mr. Klaus Kellner from Germany and with his help, OPTIMA was able to increase the capacity with the same machines and the same amount of people by 40% to 700 kitchens per day. During the time of Mr. Klaus Kellner the whole workshop looks now more like a German factory then a traditional Chinese production like it was before.
Most of the things in the carcase production are now well in order and the whole organization is working in a good way. Delayed orders could be reduced from about 500 to about 50 orders and material inside the workshop could also be reduced on a large scale to increase monetary liquidity for new investments.
In 2009 we also worked out together with SCHULER the new production line for our closet and furniture production where we could grow rapidly in the last few years.
Now OPTIMA is going to a further step and this will lead into the implementation of a software solution to organize the whole order process from order entry to the CNC machines and to the trucks which deliver the goods. We are now also considering to use the very advanced software from SCHULER for this purpose. This SCHULER software is already well implemented in the biggest kitchen producers in Germany and Europe.
We are looking forward to a very fruitful cooperation with SCHULER and are really happy to see the very good results of SCHULER in our company.
Author: Mr. Tan, General Manager, Optima Kitchen