How to optimize your production planning
- Plan all work centers
- Consider all restrictions
- Completely consider production orders
- Determine best production plan using artificial intelligence
Challenging, but not impossible:
Multi-center planning in production
For practical production sequence planning, one needs, in a nutshell, all relevant data, and an intelligent evaluation of this data.
In detail, this testifies:
What material and/or parts are needed
When the material/parts must be at which work center
Which manufacturing processes are upstream and downstream
Which rest and buffer times must be observed
Which orders have to be produced in the period under consideration and by when
The complex task requires a highly intelligent tool that can put all dependencies and restrictions into relation. The calculated, practicable detailed production plan then enables smooth, economical and resource-saving production flow.
The smart way to produce
With the ifm solution "FOX" exactly this is possible. For the first time, companies can carry out holistic and comprehensive production sequence planning. The support provided by the AI-based software makes it possible to continuously and sustainably optimize production processes and thus offers elementary support for every manufacturing company.
The waste of precious resources is also curbed or stopped altogether.
This makes FOX unique and pioneering
Improved production sequence in SAP
Every production planner is familiar with the situation: if one machine is perfectly planned, there is bound to be a hitch in the upstream or downstream process.
Due to numerous dependencies and variables, planning across multiple workstations remains an often unsolvable task.
In the SAP standard, it has hardly been possible to carry out valid planning across several workstations.
Until now, only SAP APO offered the necessary "pegging".
A common starting situation when planning bottlenecks: the planning focus is concentrated on the expected bottlenecks, and all other work centers are then planned randomly (bottleneck). planned randomly (bottleneck principle).
What is Pegging?
In the pegging process, the relationships between preceding and following production runs are determined. The more orders that are included in the period under consideration, the more complicated the network of relationships becomes.
Pegging is thus a "relationship manager" and provides the basis for the optimised production plan, which is calculated in the next step.
Formation of logical order dependencies: the search for the right predecessor and successor relationship requires a very powerful system. In make-to-stock production, this is only possible dynamically.
How is the production sequence determined?
How does the knowledge of the relationships, restrictions and availabilities become an optimal detailed production plan?
This works in the so-called "optimizer". Behind this is an intelligence that checks all dependencies and determines the optimized production sequence. The software continuously calculates further fine production plans, compares the quality with the previous result, discards the previous result, discards the worse scenario and retains the better one.
At the end of the runtime, the best of these fine production plans is ready for implementation.
Further goals & advantages resulting from efficient planning:
- Ensuring adherence to delivery dates
- Continuous utilization of existing production capacities
- Shorter lead times
- Reduction of inventories
- Permanent reduction of production costs
- Increase in delivery readiness
- Reduction of CO² emissions
Holistic planning for the entire plant: all restrictions and work centers are taken into account.
And this is how FOX works
The flowchart illustrates how the Supply Chain Excellence solution is used to extract and “peg” data from SAP (pegging process). The AI-based optimization takes place outside the system
This minimizes waiting time and the optimized production plan can simply be transferred to the system at the push of a button.
What FOX can do
Manually change and simulate planning
Optimal scheduling of orders
Solve different optimization goals together
Dynamic pegging of orders
Prioritize orders
Integrated in SAP
Plan all work centers in the factory
Recalculate as desired and without a long waiting period
Minimal manual effort
What FOX manages to do
More adherence to schedules in production
Continuous utilization of production capacities
Shorten throughput times
Reduce inventories
Permanently reduce production costs
Increase delivery readiness
Reduce CO2 emissions
