Luxury
The production challenges of the luxury industry
Optimizing production planning
The two key steps to establish a high-performing production plan
Production planning 4.0 makes it possible to clearly schedule and forecast the operations of an entire production chain, so that each task links up correctly with the next.
Production planning 4.0 makes it possible to clearly schedule and forecast the operations of an entire production chain, so that each task links up correctly with the next. It promotes the optimization of available capacity while ensuring the established deadlines. Good production planning leads to an agreement among all the teams on the short-, medium-, and long-term production objectives.
In all the luxury trades in leather goods and jewelry (machining, gem-setting, polishing, lapidary, rhodium plating, cutting, bonding, tanning, stitching, lacing, assembly, mounting…) where the number of production steps is high, it is necessary to take care of production planning in order to respect the manufacturing lead times.
The production challenges of the luxury industry can be varied. They can touch on product quality or even environmental respect and sustainability.
Another common challenge lies in the difficulty of forecasting trends and customer needs precisely, especially in a sector where consumers' tastes and preferences can change rapidly. This can involve multiple creations or the strong growth of certain product ranges, necessarily impacting the production chain and its management.
Companies will then need to understand what their capacities are to meet demand and how to dispatch the production load between their different sites.
They may also have challenges of too low a service level, a lack of visibility into the position of certain parts in the workshops, problems of stagnation of certain products and therefore very long production lead times, or a lack of visibility into the work-in-progress levels in front of the work centers (saturation, under-feeding).
To cope with the challenges encountered at production sites, companies in the luxury sector will need an agile decision-support tool that can take into account the constraints of each workshop (work-in-progress level, capacity, production contingencies).
Production planning 2.0 aims to improve the efficiency and flexibility of production processes by using advanced technologies, such as data analysis, automation, and artificial intelligence. It also offers better visibility and better predictability of production activities, which can help luxury companies better manage demand fluctuations and adapt their offering accordingly.
It allows companies in the sector to better meet consumer requirements in terms of quality, customization, and sustainability, while reducing production costs and lead times.
Finally, production planning 4.0 can also help strengthen the competitiveness of the luxury industry by allowing it to respond more quickly to market trends and consumer needs.
For your production plan to be suited to your operations, it is not only necessary to balance the loads as well as the capacities but also to schedule the operations to be carried out well.
The load/capacity balance
Load/capacity balancing consists of estimating the resources to mobilize to meet the production needs of a given period.
The load is the product of the volume of tasks and the time required for each of them ;
Human capacity corresponds to the sum of the working days, from which we subtract vacations, absences, training…
Machine capacity, for its part, is the sum of their availabilities, from which we subtract the scheduled stoppages and maintenance operations and the unforeseen stoppages.
By comparing the load and the capacity, it is possible to evaluate the possibility of producing a range of products and, if necessary, to refuse an order or part of an order or, conversely, to make available the capacity needed to execute the order.
Scheduling
Once you have ensured that your capacity is indeed in line with your load, there remains a risk of overload on the bottleneck workstations. It is then necessary to order the operations on your production chain.
Scheduling is the arrangement of the different operations that makes it possible to carry out the tasks sequentially so that the product or the project is delivered within the allotted time. In the majority of cases, scheduling is subject to different constraints, such as the order of operations, which cannot all be done in parallel. This adds difficulty to the load/capacity match on the different workstations.
Good scheduling will allow you to define a precise production schedule on the bottleneck workstations, to visualize the work-in-progress in the workshop, and to quickly identify the under-fed and over-fed workstations. You will therefore be able to easily rebalance your capacity and optimize your production.
A look back at production planning
Once your planning is established, it is very important to track on a weekly basis adherence to production objectives on a daily or weekly basis depending on the operation times. Indeed, a shift in the scheduling can have repercussions on all the rest of the production chain.
Software like Oplit will, for example, make it possible to optimize industrial planning as much as possible and will make it possible to adapt future plans according to adherence to past objectives. This will reduce production delays, work-in-progress levels, and production lead times and will increase service levels.
