Automotive
The specifics of industrial planning for the automotive industry
The steps of production planning
The Oplit solution simplifies industrial planning
Making the production process as efficient as possible, by balancing the means deployed against the needs, is a challenge that determines the proper functioning of the plant and the profitability of any industrial site.
Making the production process as efficient as possible, by balancing the means deployed against the needs, is a challenge that determines the proper functioning of the plant and the profitability of any industrial site. The finest possible production planning must therefore be implemented.
The person in charge of industrial planning has a primordial mission: estimating the medium-term load, allocating the human resources and machines needed to reach the pursued objective, and being able to adapt to changes thanks to relevant simulations.
The automotive industry in particular operates in a very specific context that imposes flawless responsiveness on it.
To grasp the challenges of the automotive field, it is essential to understand that manufacturers of vehicles as well as of spare parts are subject to constant modifications of the orders placed with them and are constrained by a strong volatility of demand.
At the same time, the market, and consequently the prime contractors, require industries to be able to deliver a potentially large number of parts or vehicles at any time, and also to be able to adapt production to any change, in the nature or characteristics of the product, almost instantaneously.
The architecture of industrial production then becomes more complex than ever, with visibility reduced to a few months or even a few weeks, depending on the production tier.
The steering of finished and semi-finished products often also proves very time-consuming and complex, especially as the sector often faces numerous stockouts. The coordinator in charge of planning must therefore benefit from sophisticated tools to forecast efficiently and quickly the sequence of the production steps, which, for their part, are relatively simple because they quite often involve single-product lines.
There are two of them and they are essential to each trade involved in the industrial process: stamping, machining, rolling, quality control, etc. The industrial planner will thus ensure:
The load-capacity match of the industrial unit
It will first be a matter of defining whether the resources are sufficient to reach the target level of stock coverage, in the medium term.
The production need can be linked to:
An order or pre-order;
A work order issued automatically by the ERP;
Determining whether the industrial unit will be able to reach the desired stock level over a precise period implies comparing the resource need with the means available over a given time. The load is then defined by the volume of work to be supplied, multiplied by the time needed to carry it out. Capacity, for its part, is represented by the available working time.
The estimation of the load-capacity match makes it possible to ensure the feasibility of the desired production plan and, where appropriate, to raise the alarm about the need for additional resources.
The automotive industry is particularly concerned by the steering of the production rate and the work-in-progress level on semi-finished products. Thus, the organization of the teams over several weeks will be decisive. However, this process, when the company chooses to favor the Excel tool over software, relies on a single key resource who will have to juggle and update sometimes up to 80 files per week. Human intervention in this management implies a risk of error that can grow, notably because of the numerous back-and-forths between the constraints on stock and the constraints on machine capacities. Indeed, the greater the constraints, the more the margin of error increases.
Making scheduling effective
Scheduling amounts to managing production priorities on a daily basis, by planning all the tasks to be carried out with a high level of complexity. The industrial planning department must here imperatively have total visibility into all the means available, the load level borne, and the production objectives to be reached.
The role of the scheduler will be to find the arrangement that makes it possible to sequentially execute the work orders, in such a way that all of the production is completed within the allotted time. It is therefore a matter not only of loading the different means with the right production operation, but also of acting as a conductor for the fluidity of the entire production.
Adaptation is the rule for the two planning horizons: the achievement of objectives must be tracked permanently, with a view to adapting future plans according to the adherence rate to the production objectives. However, as for the planning exercise, the use of Excel files makes the scheduler's tracking of objectives from one week to the next quite complex.
As a SaaS solution accessible from each of the workstations involved in planning, Oplit aims to forecast and organize production with a view to optimizing the service level. In particular, it makes it possible to ensure the infallible success of the missions of industrial planning: determining the feasibility of the objectives ensuring the on-time delivery of the required production, and optimizing the allocation of human and mechanical resources.
Even in a period of reasonable load, Oplit makes it possible to produce the production need as well and as quickly as possible. The resources thus freed up can then be reallocated, or other orders can be honored: the competitiveness gain is immediate.
The reduction of the production work-in-progress and the better allocation of people will also naturally generate a decrease in production shortages. The medium-term vision offered by the simulations will leave room for maneuver for adjusting human resources.
Regarding the method, Oplit intervenes very concretely on the two aforementioned planning steps:
On the load-capacity ratio: the simulations carried out make it possible to adapt the production objectives and the allocation of human means according to the demand of the coming months. The availability of the teams, including the foreseeable absences and the training sessions, are taken into account.
On scheduling: the production schedule is defined from the "bottleneck" workstations determining the maximum production rate. By visualizing the production work-in-progress in the workshop through each link, the over-fed or under-fed workstations are quickly identified.
At any time, it is possible to modify the simulation assumptions, to integrate a new piece of data: a new order, a modification of the human resource, a machine breakdown, etc. The production process is then modified for all the stakeholders and the new priorities, clearly displayed on their screen. The updated orders make production fluid despite the changes, and this, without loss of time.
The automotive industry is undoubtedly among the most complex production machines to organize on a daily basis, just behind, perhaps, the planning of the aeronautics industry. Being subject to constant disruptions, it cannot settle for approximate planning: the use of high-performing industrial-planning software is indispensable.
Oplit's intervention then provides unprecedented responsiveness and, by extension, leads to a strong increase in the competitiveness of a unit gaining in service level.
