Of all the old processes and methodologies still employed in otherwise modern manufacturing organizations, production scheduling should be a priority for digital transformation. Advanced planning and scheduling (APS) systems integrate with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to enhance the management of complex production environments. This blog post discusses the impact of various constraints on short-term production planning and how APS enhances manufacturing processes.
APS optimizes schedule accuracy and can dynamically respond to changes in production. The inaccurate production schedules that result from a lack of APS often lead to late orders, overtime work or high inventory levels.
Trends: customization and rapid delivery
Manufacturers are challenged by increasing customer demands in two main areas: mass customization and rapid delivery times, and both are exacerbating already complex operations. The manufacturers must adapt to these new customer requirements.
An example of the customization challenge: In configure-to-order environments, bills of materials differ between orders. Thus, the number of parts may differ, leading to longer operation times.
For the challenge of delivery times: Production planners have close, interdependent relationships with the sales department. Production planners rely on accurate sales forecasts and demand information. Sales depend on production planners to ensure that products are manufactured and available on time to meet customer expectations. Planners should also be capable of providing feasible delivery times for sales, enabling them to promise timely delivery of new orders confidently.
Constraints affecting scheduling
The efficacy of schedulers and planners is affected by many factors, each one with a constraint and/or challenge of its own. Here are three key reasons why creating an optimized schedule might be a really challenging task, and even impossible without the correct tools.
- Multiple resources: One of the key advantages of advanced scheduling tools is the ability to schedule against production resources and constraints. For example, when scheduling five orders to a single resource such as work center or CNC machine, there are 120 different routing combinations, as 5 orders can be arranged by five factorial. Now, let’s add another resource and operation, and there are 14,400 different combinations.
- Scarcity of equipment: Some operations may require special tools or jigs that a company has in limited quantity, which are therefore located only at certain workstations or need to be moved to the required workstation. These considerations should also be factored into the production schedule.
- Inventory management: Materials also impact Often, companies prefer not to have large inventories of parts on the shelf, tying up capital. That’s why materials are ordered based on need. This affects production scheduling as operations should be scheduled only when materials are available, avoiding the creation of unnecessary work-in-progress stock waiting for missing materials.
Some companies have overcome these challenges by establishing general batch sizes or scheduling practices on how to combine different orders. Others may ignore the details in the scheduling, trusting that shift managers know how to dispatch work during their shifts. However, this approach is often not optimal and could cause issues in production, resulting in time spent firefighting issues rather than on value-adding work. Firefighting issues might, for example, increase costs due to overtime work when a production planner must create new ad hoc production schedules. Or production workers may try to manufacture orders on time by working longer hours.
Fast and visual results
Optimizing schedules
With the different variables affecting production scheduling, creating schedules manually would be a really challenging and time-consuming task. The leading APS systems offer customizable scheduling rules, with which scheduling can be done in minutes. Then, the planner has time to analyze and fine-tune the schedule and possibly create alternative schedules.
Sometimes, different scheduling rules might be needed to find the optimal schedule. Visual tools and graphs simplify the complex task of comparing different schedules. With APS, it’s even possible to compare two or more different schedules against key performance indicators.
Scheduling against constraints
Some production resources, like work centers or CNC machines, may become bottlenecks. For these scenarios, look for an APS system that not only creates schedules against the bottleneck constraint but can identify the bottleneck with visual tools.
Often, the bottlenecks might not be fixed, or they change after machines break down. In the case of flexible production, bottlenecks can change according to orders. When a bottleneck changes, it’s important to identify it when creating a schedule. Visual tools help with this. After identifying a bottleneck, the planner can try to improve the resource capacity or optimize other resources against that constraint.
Simulating potential issues
Visual tools also enable what-if simulations, which are invaluable for identifying and addressing potential issues early on. This means that you can create various schedules using different algorithms or simulate the effects of a machine breakdown.
If these points resonate with you, I would be delighted to discuss further how Eviden can assist in enhancing your production scheduling.
Let’s chat! Connect with me and let’s exchange ideas on APS tools and how you can change the game with an APS solution for your business.
Learn more about Eviden’s manufacturing operations management offerings.
