Solutions
The prerequisites in terms of features
A closer look at the key features
In conclusion
Industrial production planning solutions are developing and present real advantages over manual tools of the Excel type, which are quite useful but which have limits in terms of updating, maintenance, and interactivity.
Industrial production planning solutions are developing and present real advantages over manual tools of the Excel type. Although quite useful, they nevertheless have limits in terms of updating, maintenance, and interactivity.
If you are ready to move to an industrial planning solution 4.0, it is essential that it meets the unique needs of your company and that it can evolve with it over time.
To select the right industrial planning tool, you must take into account several criteria:
Flexibility: you need a tool that adapts to your company and to your own processes.
Ergonomics and UX: the tool must be easy to use and understand; the interface must be intuitive and user-friendly.
Data handling: the tool must be able to manage and store large volumes of data and to secure them.
Integration with other systems: the tool must be able to integrate with other systems, such as ERPs, etc.
Features: you must choose a tool that offers the features you need and that can evolve.
Scalability : the tool must be able to adapt to the evolution of your company.
Support: the tool must offer technical support, quality customer service, and regularly updated documentation.
Updates : they must be regular and automatic and must make it possible to adapt to technological developments.
The best practices of production planning include the implementation of management techniques such as bottleneck management, global management, pull flow, and other methods to avoid delivery delays, minimize the risks of stockout, and maximize the use of human and material resources.
Production planning and scheduling are also essential to meet customer delivery deadlines and to control work-in-progress. It is also important to give the company the data necessary so that it can grow and stand out in the market.
A plug & play solution
The selected solution must be able to pull your data directly from the ERP into your interface and be operational and usable in less than a month. The objective will be to obtain an ROI within 3 months to validate your choice.
Multi-site visibility
This is a key feature to visualize the load at group level, to quickly identify overloaded and underloaded industrial sites, and to carry out your master production schedule at group level as well.
The objective of this feature is to help you boost the decision-making for optimizing your inter-site load.
The load / capacity simulator
A feature of paramount importance to identify the key under-capacity work centers and simulate different capacity assumptions to ensure an optimal service level.
You will also need to be able to validate the simulation with the assumptions to be implemented during MPS meetings.
The objective of this feature is to halve your planning time.
Team management
First, you will need to be able to determine your teams' schedule on the different work centers. Then, you must be able to simulate your capacity according to the real allocation of your teams and then to simulate the impact of recruitment on capacity (temporary workers, fixed-term contracts, subcontracting...).
This with the aim of improving your teams' productivity.
Finished-product stock management
Another key feature will be to be able to determine a target stock for each of your references (or families) and to be alerted each time one of your references reaches a critical threshold. You will thus be able to gradually optimize your target coverage levels.
Benefiting from this feature in your planning solution will certainly allow you to reduce your work-in-progress and to decrease your finished-product stockouts.
Automated scheduling
An automated scheduling feature will allow you not only to save time on the scheduling phase, but also to easily readjust your scheduling according to the different customer needs and production contingencies. This feature must be based on your scheduling rules (delay, priority, stock...).
Work-in-progress management
This feature allows you to broadcast the operations to be carried out for each work center. The queue view is the most appreciable. It makes it possible to quickly identify overloaded work centers in order to adjust your production.
A tag system will allow you to tag operators on the tasks they have to do.
The objective is of course to improve your service level and your production lead time.
Production monitoring
Being able to monitor your operations directly in the interface of your industrial planning solution is a must. You must be able to visualize the adherence rate to your production objectives for all the work centers in order to identify, in particular, the underperforming work centers.
This feature will allow you to boost your adherence rate to production objectives.
A performance-indicator dashboard
Finally, to take the pulse of your plants, being able to visualize your KPIs directly in the interface will allow you to identify those that have not had the hoped-for evolution in order to modify your strategies and thus quickly change tack.
This will certainly boost your continuous-improvement decisions (improvement of routings, reduction of lead time, of work-in-progress...).
Given the challenges of the industrial sector, the solution you choose must allow you to react quickly to unforeseen events, and to equip each stakeholder of your production chain with tools to support the best decision.
