Forest Products Industry Digital Transformation Story | Yıldız Entegre Succeeded
About the Company
With more than a century of experience, Yıldız Entegre is Turkey’s leading manufacturer and one of the world’s top 10 producers in the forest products industry. Guided by its principle of “Respect for Nature and People,” the company offers a broad portfolio of products, including MDF, particleboard, laminate flooring, door panels, and decorative surface products.
Operating globally with 8 production facilities, 1 warehouse, and 1 port across Türkiye, Romania, and Slovenia, Yıldız Entegre launched its digital transformation journey to improve production efficiency, standardize operations across multiple facilities, and strengthen production planning. By implementing ProManage, the company established a transparent, data-driven production and planning structure and achieved significant improvements in operational performance.
Adem Akçay
Reasons for Need
Yıldız Entegre launched its digital transformation initiative to improve production efficiency and manage operations through real-time, data-driven decision-making. By reducing the time losses caused by manual processes, the company aimed to establish a more transparent, measurable, and sustainable production structure.
- Accurate Performance Measurement: There was a need to objectively monitor workforce productivity, equipment utilization, downtime, and scrap rates through real-time production data.
- Improving Capacity Utilization: Before making new investment decisions, the company aimed to accurately evaluate how efficiently existing machinery and production resources were being utilized.
- Establishing a Common Management Language Across Facilities: A standardized performance management approach was required to compare and evaluate production performance consistently across multiple manufacturing sites.
- Enhancing Data Quality and Decision-Making Speed: Eliminating inconsistencies caused by manual data collection and accelerating analysis were essential to support faster and more reliable operational decisions.
- Increasing Planning Visibility: The company sought to create a planning structure where production plans could be monitored over longer time horizons and operational changes could be managed more effectively.
- Supporting Lean Manufacturing and Continuous Improvement: Reliable production data was needed to strengthen OEE monitoring, bottleneck analysis, Kaizen initiatives, and continuous improvement activities.
Motivation for Choosing and Important Details
As Yıldız Entegre evaluated its digital transformation journey, it recognized that sustainable visibility, operational speed, and data accuracy could only be achieved through a reliable digital platform. Beyond technological capabilities, the company prioritized long-term business value, seamless integration, and industry expertise when selecting its solution partner.
- Seamless Integration Capability: The solution needed to integrate smoothly with the existing SAP ERP system and third-party applications through secure, bidirectional data exchange.
- Proven Industry Experience: A solution provider with strong manufacturing expertise, an extensive customer base, and proven success in similar production environments was considered essential.
- Consulting and Implementation Expertise: The company prioritized an experienced team capable of understanding operational requirements quickly, delivering tailored solutions, and managing the project efficiently.
- Reliable and Objective Data Collection: Replacing subjective manual reporting with accurate production data covering downtime, scrap, and efficiency was one of the key decision criteria.
- Long-Term Business Value: Beyond investment cost, the expected contribution to operational efficiency, visibility, and sustainable business improvement played a significant role in the evaluation process.
- Infrastructure and Equipment Compatibility: The selected solution needed to adapt seamlessly to Yıldız Entegre’s extensive machine park and production infrastructure across multiple facilities.
Personal Experiences
The key experiences Yıldız Entegre gained throughout its digital transformation journey and the lessons learned from the process are summarized below:
- Executive Management Support: Active leadership support played a critical role in ensuring that the digital transformation initiative was embraced and adopted across the entire organization.
- Establishment of a Dedicated MES Project Team: A dedicated MES project team, composed of experts from the production organization, was established to prioritize operational needs, strengthen coordination, and accelerate the implementation process.
- Cultural Transformation and Change Management: As production, planning, and operational workflows evolved, a comprehensive change management program helped employees successfully adapt to the new way of working.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration and ERP Integration: Close collaboration between production, maintenance, IT, and planning teams enabled successful ERP integration and ensured operational alignment throughout the transformation.
- Training and Digital Competency Development: Comprehensive training programs were delivered to all user groups—from operators to managers—to encourage effective adoption and long-term use of digital systems.
- Paperless Operations and a Unified Data Language: By digitalizing processes ranging from production confirmations to scrap reporting, paper-based workflows were eliminated, enabling planning, production, and maintenance teams to operate using a common, data-driven language.
What Has ProManage Brought?
ProManage has delivered significant improvements across Yıldız Entegre’s production and planning processes, creating measurable operational and business value through digital transformation.
- Higher Production Plan Compliance: Production plan compliance increased to 90%, while on-time delivery performance reached 85%, strengthening operational discipline and customer commitment.
- Long-Term and Dynamic Production Scheduling: Production plans that were previously prepared on a daily or weekly basis can now be managed with visibility extending up to three months, providing greater flexibility through drag-and-drop scheduling.
- Paperless and Error-Free Operations: Production confirmations, scrap declarations, and labeling processes have been fully digitalized, eliminating paper-based workflows and reducing errors caused by manual data entry.
- A Common Data Language and Transparent Management: By enabling every department—from operators to senior management—to work with objective production indicators such as OEE and TEP, communication and cross-functional collaboration have been significantly strengthened.
- Inventory Optimization and Cost Reduction: More effective management of semi-finished inventory has optimized stock levels, reduced operational costs, and improved overall production efficiency.
- Faster Decision-Making and Continuous Improvement: Real-time visibility into breakdowns, downtime, and quality issues has enabled Kaizen initiatives to be implemented more quickly and based on reliable production data.
- Improved Customer Service Through Automation: Reducing manual communication between sales and planning teams has enabled customers to receive accurate delivery date information automatically through digital tools.
- Data-Driven Investment Planning: Clear visibility into machine capacity utilization enables new equipment investment decisions to be evaluated using actual production data rather than assumptions.
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