How a US defense prime raised clear-to-build 48% across 18 sites
More than 10,000 production hours were blocked every week by shortages and scheduling conflicts, and planners rebuilt the clear-to-build picture by hand from 40+ spreadsheets. Pelico gave planners, buyers and schedulers one source of truth for execution. Live across 18 sites with 750+ weekly users, clear-to-build rose 48% in under a year.
The starting point
Production hours blocked
10,000+
Hours needed
>6 million
Spreadsheets
40+
Backlog
4 years
Challenges
Every plant could see demand. No one could see the impact.
A major US defense prime carries a four-year backlog from surging customer demand. With the existing tools and processes, clearing that backlog would require more than six million extra production hours a year, and building the capacity would take close to a decade.
Across the network, more than 10,000 production hours were blocked every week by shortages and scheduling conflicts. MRP reset the plan once a month, but demand changed three or four times before the next reset, so no plan held for long.
- Checking clear-to-build for 100+ assemblies took three to four hours.
- Every line of balance review took 30+ hours of preparation, every two weeks.
- The data lived in 40+ spreadsheets and 30+ local tools.
- Planners crossed three or four of them to finish a single workflow.
Objectives
One shared picture of what blocks the build
Planners, buyers and schedulers needed to work the same constraint at the same moment, instead of reconciling their own versions of it.
- Rank every open constraint by business impact and program priority.
- Move from weekly reviews to a daily execution cycle.
- Extend visibility past one week, so shortages surface early enough to recover.
- Test a production ramp before committing to it.
The Fix
One execution layer above the systems of record
With Pelico's manufacturing orchestration platform, the team adopted one execution layer above the systems of record, shared by every program and every site.
- From 70+ local tools and spreadsheets to 1 system: every open constraint is ranked by business impact. Schedulers open the day on what will stop a build next, instead of building lists from raw data. Tool-switching fell 75%.
- From weekly reviews to a daily cycle: coordination that ran through email and team chats now runs in one place.
- From 1 week of visibility to 12: supply chain teams see about 12 weeks ahead, so shortages surface early enough to recover.
- From guessing a ramp to testing it: when leadership asks to go from 5 to 10 units per week, schedulers load the new rate into Pelico and see within minutes which parts would block it, then work those shortages before committing.
- Solutions: Material coverage, Program management
- Scope: 18 sites, 750+ weekly users
- Teams: production control, buyers, master schedulers, program managers
Download the case study
The results
Annualized delivery impact across key programs
+$100M
Clear-to-build
+48%
Shortage resolution time
<1 wk
Planning horizon
12x
Low-value tasks
-60%
Weekly users
750+
Material coverage rose 18 points, and shortage resolution time fell from two to three weeks to less than one week.
Shortage-related communication dropped 50% and tool-switching fell 75%. The first week procurement ran its top-tier review in Pelico, the meeting went from 90 minutes to 45.
What made the difference
Planning harder didn't help, because reality changed too fast. More internal tools only added more versions of truth to reconcile. Planners, buyers and schedulers now work from the same position, at the same moment, on the same constraint.
See what Pelico could do for you
Recognize your own operation in this story? A thirty-minute session with our team will tell you whether the same approach fits. No preparation is required.
