Vincent Guinard, Production Supervisor at Lisi Aerospace
How Lisi Aerospace replaced a heavy Excel-based planning process with Oplit and gained a full day back every month per planner.
About
Lisi Aerospace
Lisi Aerospace, a major player in the aerospace industry, places the digitalization of its industrial operations and innovation at the heart of its growth strategy.
The Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône site produces large volumes of screws and nuts for the aerospace industry. The site supplies numerous clients, making production planning a critical lever to meet delivery commitments and customer expectations.
Impact
The story
Lisi Aerospace is a major player in the aerospace industry, with digitalization and innovation at the heart of its growth strategy. The Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône site produces bolts and nuts for the aerospace sector at high volume, serving numerous clients. With a 3-month lead time and complex load/capacity dynamics, planning precision is critical to meeting delivery commitments and customer expectations.
The challenge
Before Oplit, load/capacity analysis at Lisi Aerospace relied on a particularly heavy Excel file. Updating the data through extractions and macros required significant time from the logistics team, often taking three quarters of a day for two people just to make the file usable. The process was stressful, done at the last minute to keep data as fresh as possible, and completely non-collaborative since only one person could work on it at a time. Simulation horizon was limited to one month, while the actual lead time was three months. In planning meetings, the team could only present preliminary estimates, and sessions ended with as many open questions as decisions made.
Oplit's approach
Oplit replaced the Excel file with a live, collaborative planning environment. Data updates happen automatically, eliminating the three-quarters-of-a-day manual update process. Planners can now instantly see the impact of any change on the organization, run hypothetical scenarios, and project capacity over a meaningful time horizon aligned with the actual 3-month lead time. The team schedule for capacity calculation is described by Vincent as simply remarkable, and automatic production target tracking allows immediate identification of where things are not on track.
Oplit is now used daily by the production supervisor and the planning team. Planning meetings have become more dynamic and strategic: instead of updating data and drawing conclusions, the team now builds hypotheses, runs live scenarios, and makes decisions using a shared operational language. New collaborators can take ownership of the solution on their first day, compared to the two weeks previously needed just to understand the Excel file. The solution is also enabling better standardization of best practices across Lisi's different industrial sites.
Beyond day-to-day planning, Oplit has become a tool for strategic decision-making. The team uses it to simulate capacity scenarios, anticipate workload peaks, and make faster, better-informed decisions in planning reviews. Transparency has improved across all sites, and the quality of conversations has increased significantly. The next steps for Lisi include extending Oplit's use to scheduling and raw material supply automation.
