Should you find yourself visiting a hospital, you’ll most likely be in the company of plastic material supplied by Pacur. Located in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Pacur is an ISO 9001 certified custom sheet extruder specializing in the extrusion of light and heavy gauge polyester, copolyester, and polypropylene resins for a variety of applications. The company is a market- leading supplier of specialty plastic materials for the medical device industry.
Since implementing Plex ERP in 2021, Pacur has witnessed impressive improvements to their operations – these improvements have allowed them to continuously innovate their production. In recognition of their ingenuity, Pacur is this year’s 2024 Plex Innovator Impact Award winner.
Pacur
Founded in 1979, Pacur initially started with their single Wisconsin-based facility. In the years that passed, the company grew and their operations have since expanded to include an additional company, Carolex, that is based in Longué, France. The ability to scale globally is no mere coincidence, but instead a testament to the company’s progress-forward business practices. Knowing the product is often used in a highly impactful setting, the company prides themselves on ensuring they deliver the highest quality to their customers. This is exemplified by the material used in their plastics—various polyester and copolyester resins and homopolymer and copolymer polypropylenes. Efficient, these resins offer clarity, minimal environmental impact, and they are FDA approved for food and medical packaging.
Cloud-Based Call for Change
Recognizing a need for operational and business improvements, the Pacur team started their search for a new ERP system in 2021. Hoping to move away from a system that required on-site connectivity, a cloud-based solution became the priority. Pacur also focused on two additional capabilities – scheduling software and a comprehensive quality tracking and management system. One of the results they hoped to see by making this change was the ability to overcome challenges with tracking in-process quality. Problems were often caught after the fact and manual errors resulted in unwanted waste. Pacur desired a solution that was not only intuitive but also automated. The company knew that operation from a single source of truth would support their ISO certification compliance and them to more easily meet industry standards.
An Innovative Plex Partnership
Since successfully implementing—which included individualized employee training to ensure go-live readiness—Pacur has experienced impressive improvements. From breaking down information silos, to increasing access to real-time data, and to digitizing manual, paper-based processes, the plastics company wasted no time reaping the benefits of their new system.
3 years have passed since its implementation and Pacur has kicked off additional Plex projects. With continued support from Platinum Partner, Control+M Solutions, the Pacur team has been able to refine their production processes and creatively innovate.
Let’s look at Pacur’s results and recent innovations with Plex:
- Improved On-Time, In-Full (OTIF) by 125%. Prior to Plex, OTIF was 40%. Since implementing, OTIF has increased to 90%.
- Decreased monthly close-of-books from 3 weeks to 5 days
- Reduced invoice processing from 2 weeks to 1 day
- Increased visibility and clarity into demand, allowing Pacur to realize that they could reduce costs and improve efficiency by purchasing a splitting line. Rather than introducing an additional extrusion line, they enlarged their rolls and now split them to size. This has increased the capacity of the extrusion lines at a much lower cost.
- Strengthened sustainability efforts by recycling and reprocessing traceable customer waste. By utilizing Plex’s traceability features, Pacur grinds the returned waste and then uses it as a partial source material for limited products without the fear of contamination.
Plex ERP empowered Pacur to identify areas of improvement within their existing manufacturing infrastructure. Once identified, Pacur creatively approached solving these challenges – because of this innovation, the plastic supplier has been able to improve customer delivery and increase production capacity in both a financially and sustainably responsible manner.
The 2024 Innovator Impact Award
Rather than migrate to a new smart manufacturing platform and continue business as usual, Pacur chose to leverage their new technology for exciting improvement. Innovation has been key in Pacur’s success, allowing them to approach a production capacity and customer demand issue with greater ease. Innovation has also led Pacur to their outstanding OTIF increase. Congratulations to Pacur for being selected as the 2024 Innovator Impact Award Winner! Innovation occurs across the entire Plex customer base. Read success story here and learn about ways other companies use Plex to reimagine their operations.
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