Al-Sharq Plastics: Cutting raw material waste by 22% in a 12-line factory
Raw material consumption was recorded only as a monthly lump sum with no link to production orders, leaving waste an unexplained mystery while true manufacturing cost arrived weeks late. We implemented Avanta's manufacturing modules with bills of materials, production orders, and quality control tied into inventory and accounting.
22%
Reduction in raw material waste
يومان
Production cost closing, down from two weeks
12
Production lines on live work orders
Background
Founded in 2009 to produce plastic bags and packaging for food and detergent companies, the factory gradually expanded to twelve production lines running three shifts. It stocks over sixty tons of polyethylene pellets in various grades and colors, with hundreds of products built to customer-specific specifications. Despite this scale, production management still ran on paper work orders shuttling between planning offices and shop floors, while accounting received consumption figures as one undifferentiated monthly total.
The challenge
The fundamental equation was missing: weights of material entering lines versus product leaving them were never reconciled at the work-order level, so the gap — worth hundreds of thousands annually — landed as an opaque accounting line called inventory variances, unexplained. Commercially, quoting a new customer depended on a sales manager's gut estimate of running costs, and those estimates routinely hid losses that surfaced only after the fact. Quality defects, meanwhile, were usually discovered at the customer's end rather than at the line, costing the factory both replacement goods and eroded credibility.
The solution
We built a standard bill of materials for every product specifying raw quantities and acceptable waste ratios per stage, then activated electronic work orders that automatically pull material from stores the moment production starts and return output to stock with weights entered from line scales. Each line team logged stoppages and their causes live on a dedicated screen, while quality inspection became a mandatory checkpoint before any work order closes. This accumulated a true per-order cost — material, labor, energy, and overhead — down to the product level instead of the factory as a whole.
Implementation
The project spanned twelve weeks. The first four went to coding over seven hundred products, building bills of materials alongside production engineers, and validating consumption factors with field measurement on every line. A three-week pilot then ran on two adjacent lines, during which we corrected initial consumption factors and trained shift leaders on live logging. The final five weeks progressively extended coverage to the remaining lines, shift by shift, with edit rights over the bills of materials restricted to a single engineer to preserve standard consistency.
The outcome
For the first time, deviation between standard and actual consumption appeared as numbers rather than estimates, and the data revealed six lines running on outdated consumption factors that no longer reflected their current calibration; recalibrating them cut overall waste by 22%. Actual work-order costs became available within two days of closing instead of two weeks of manual consolidation, while sales began issuing accurate quotes within hours based on complete costs rather than estimates. Customer defect claims also fell as quality detection moved to the point of production itself.
Lasting impact
Monthly production planning is now built on each line's measured actual capacity net of known stoppage time, replacing the theoretical rates that ignored shop-floor reality. Management now enters annual contract negotiations with major clients armed with product-cost reports and a confidence that was never possible before — every contract's margin is known before signature. Current figures indicate the factory is ready to add a fourth shift on its highest-margin lines without uncalculated cost risk.
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