Planning Production When Faced with Competing Business Needs

Effective production planning and scheduling are core competencies of competitive process supply chains. But the growing complexity of process industries has made achieving this goal more challenging. Corporate consolidation, globalization and expanding product portfolios increase supply chain complexity while growing competition, increased customer demands and difficult market economics put pressure on producers to meet challenging financial performance goals.

Accordingly, production planners and schedulers have to focus on several important goals: scheduling the plant efficiently, keeping inventories low, satisfying customer demand, and anticipating the impact of every decision on the supply chain.

They should understand how much inventory is needed to support demand during the production cycle, and how much is needed to support a desired level of customer service. They should know how to reshape plans smoothly and responsively, without breaking the rhythm of the plant. And they should be able to visualize the impact of a planning decision on the entire supply chain.

How can this optimization be accomplished to maximize your return on assets?

Optimize Production Planning with Picaso™ from WAM Systems

Optimizing production requires five key capabilities:

1. Generating Accurate Forecasts

   

   Picaso provides the powerful yet flexible forecasting tools you need to develop timely, accurate forecasts. You start with Picaso's statistical forecasting engine, which provides a first-cut projection based on methods and criteria tailored to your business. Picaso's forecasting tool prioritizes high-value customers and key accounts with individual attention, and handles smaller customers collectively. The collaborative features enable the key stakeholders to focus on the important details, easily share information, and arrive at a consensus. Customers can also be included in the collaborative process to achieve more accurate forecasting.

2. Optimizing Product Mix and Asset Usage

   The Picaso Supply Chain Optimizer uses advanced analytical techniques—powered by the ILOG optimization engine—to map your demand forecast across the supply chain, providing sales and production plans that accommodate your capacity limitations while maximizing profitability. Product and customer mix can be analyzed interactively to find a business blend that improves the use of your equipment. And alternative scenarios can be easily run to assess the impact of various customer and production options.

3. Optimizing Production Policies

   The Picaso Cycle Optimizer helps you balance production costs against the costs of holding inventory. By using this tool, production planners determine the optimal policies for product frequency, cycle length or production campaign length, as well as target levels for cycle and safety-stock inventories.

4. Scheduling in the Face of Change

   

   Through its integration of supply chain simulation and process production modeling, Picaso provides a decision-making cockpit that gives the production planner the right information at the right time. The impact of every scheduling decision can always be seen graphically at every point in the supply chain. In addition, powerful optimization is built into the solution. Picaso provides the best schedule to meet the near-term and long-term goals of the organization while providing clear solutions that you can rely on and execute. Picaso Scheduling is built on a production model unique to process operations. This model offers many features, including multiple formatting, product-to-product transitions, lot quality variability, cycle and campaign simulation, and tank farm and complex storage modeling.

5. Monitoring and Assessing Performance

   The Picaso Supply Chain Event Monitor maintains an up-to-the-minute simulation of your future supply chain. You can rapidly identify problems as they occur, and take corrective action by repositioning inventories and altering production schedules. By using the Picaso Interactive Value Analysis, schedulers can instantly assess the impact of schedule changes on profitability.

The Picaso suite of supply chain solutions provides these capabilities and delivers the information you need to successfully optimize production in a complex and competitive marketplace.

Bottom Line—Maximizing Your Return

Effective planning and scheduling help you maximize your return on high-value production assets. By improving forecast accuracy, and using the latest techniques for meeting that demand and developing optimal production plans and schedules, you can achieve significant savings from increased capacity use and decreased transition cost. And you accomplish all this while providing a high level of customer service.