Francisco Aragon

Francisco Aragon, a Spanish chemical company headquartered in the Murcia region, produces ambient products — scented candles, fragrance sticks, insecticides, and aerosols — for major retailers across Europe and expanding markets in the USA and South America. As the company scaled from a regional supplier to a global operation, their production planning infrastructure collapsed under the weight of the complexity. Managing 35+ specialized production lines across two plants, with over 1,000 SKUs and customers demanding different formulations, packaging configurations, and lead times, their existing system could no longer sequence or prioritize work effectively. Simultaneously, the business needed to shift from a make-to-stock model to make-to-order — a fundamental change that existing planning tools were not designed to support.

Francisco Aragon implemented Siemens Opcenter APS (Advanced Planning and Scheduling) across both manufacturing plants, establishing centralized visibility and constraint-based scheduling across all 35 production lines. Opcenter APS replaced manual or spreadsheet-driven planning with automated finite-capacity scheduling that accounts for line constraints, material availability, and customer priorities simultaneously. Siemens' role extended beyond software delivery — the implementation addressed the underlying process change from make-to-stock to make-to-order, requiring the planning logic to be rebuilt around customer orders rather than replenishment targets. The system was configured to handle the full SKU breadth of 1,000+ products and diverse global customer requirements, giving planners a single environment to manage multi-plant sequencing and respond to demand changes without losing production efficiency.

Following the Opcenter APS deployment, Francisco Aragon achieved operational stability and agility across a production environment that had previously been unmanageable at scale. Key outcomes include:

• 35+ production lines brought under unified scheduling and visibility across two plants
• 1,000+ SKUs managed within a single planning system, supporting diverse European, US, and South American customer requirements
• Successful transition from make-to-stock to make-to-order production model, fundamentally changing how demand is translated into production schedules
• Planners gained the ability to respond to shifting global customer priorities without sacrificing throughput or line utilization

The company's CIO described the prior state as an "explosion" of complexity — Opcenter APS converted that complexity into a manageable, structured planning process.

• Make-to-order transitions require scheduling infrastructure, not just process changes — advanced constraint-based scheduling is a prerequisite, not an afterthought.
• SKU proliferation is a planning problem before it is a production problem — companies managing 1,000+ SKUs need systems that can sequence and prioritize automatically.
• Multi-plant visibility must be centralized — managing 35+ lines across separate plants with disconnected tools creates blind spots that compound under global demand.
• Global expansion amplifies planning complexity non-linearly — each new market adds not just volume but variability in lead times, packaging, and regulatory requirements that generic ERP scheduling cannot absorb.
• APS implementations should be scoped around the business model change, not just the current production footprint.