Advanced Planning for Demanding Planning Environments
In order to become more competitive, industrial manufacturers have often decided to take the route of Advanced Planning and Scheduling, which has been around for decades. APS systems gained a good reputation for delivering tangible improvements to KPIs like on-time reliability, inventory levels and so forth. However, there are environments, conditions and companies in which APS implementations do not yield expected results, or where they even fail to deliver completely.
Things like that usually happen in companies operating within what LOGIS calls Demanding Planning Environments. These are distinguished by a high degree of uniqueness, complexity, and by extensive scope which represent the most common causes of failures of classic APS projects.
LOGIS now introduces planning tools designed for deployment in Demanding Planning Environments – designed to satisfy the above-mentioned exceptionally high requirements on a planning system, and to allow companies that find themselves in these environments achieve major improvements of their operational efficiency and customer delivery performance.
High uniqueness
It is no surprise that complex businesses are not alike. And so, when it comes to production planning in these, there is a multitude of processes and constraints that have to be taken into account during planning and that are highly specific to the given company (or industry).
Unlike conventional APS systems with a fixed set of known constraints and a fixed data model and UI, the tools introduced by LOGIS offer unprecedented customization ability. They make it possible to introduce company-specific constraints into the planning system, to functionally customize the user interface or to even create completely new forms, enabling even companies in the most demanding planning environments to create robust plans for managing their production.
Extensive scope
It cannot be reasonably expected that planning of a large-scale enterprise could be handled by a single planner. In real world, however, team planning is a problem. When one planner moves an operation, it almost always inadvertently causes changes to downstream operations of other planners, and the planners are in fact forced to play ping-pong among themselves trying to shape the plan according to their desires.
LOGIS planning tools are equipped with a true multiuser planning ability, allowing to systematically solve any conflicts in the actions of different planners. Situations when one planner’s action would break the work results of another planner are completely excluded. The final plan can thus be drafted while all planners’ proposals are taken into account so that the final plan value is maximized. Therefore, the final plan quality can be reached regularly, not just by a chance.
LOGIS planning tools also feature Undo/Redo, a functionality that is unique in the world of advanced planning systems, allowing a far more flexible, and more comfortable work.
High complexity
Operational efficiency of industrial companies is far more important than ever before. And more difficult to achieve. Companies operating in demanding planning environments can no longer rely on a single, universal solver integrated in their planning systems. However, employing multiple specialized solvers usually fails since they are blind to one another’s constraints – a capacity planning solver cannot consider the chemical properties of heats of steel and so on. Nevertheless, it is clear that all major constraints must be considered for a quality plan to be created.
LOGIS has developed a technology thanks to which it is possible to achieve cooperation between different solvers which are blind to one another’s constraints. This technique has been already successfully used in the real world.
Limited predictability
Having a crystal ball would make the life of companies in demanding planning environments so much easier! Sadly, we still haven’t met a company that would have it… Changes in the order book, unexpected outages or unstable production yield – all that underlines the need to be able to rapidly plan (and re-plan) production to reflect situation changes.
LOGIS planning tools are equipped with a state-of-the-art technology allowing to re-plan even production of a top 10 worldwide steelmaker in a matter of a few minutes.
Generally speaking, it can be said that the more demanding the planning environment, the larger the benefit of utilizing these technologies compared to conventional APS solutions.
All together, these technologies allow for developing robust planning systems even in the most demanding environments. Systems, that allow for making informed decisions, and ultimately, achieving outstanding levels of operational efficiency and customer delivery performance.
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