As the saying goes, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Certainly not in the manufacturing arena, where the enemy to any well-conceived schedule can come in many guises – from staff sickness to a delayed shipment of key materials.
Look a little deeper at the challenge though, and you also come up against traditional planning tools.
These can be found, for example, in many of the ERP solutions used across the industry. The problem with them is that they work from the perspective of infinite capacity. In other words, they help create the artificial view that all components of the plan are 100% operational – which as we know is rarely the case.
Understanding the boundaries
What MESTEC offers is an Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) tool. With it, you can dynamically plan – and constantly adapt it – in line with actual conditions on the shop floor. As a result, your visibility of what’s happening in real time is fundamentally transformed – as is your ability to quickly respond to any emerging crisis.
As an example, APS enables you to actively monitor all constraints within the factory:
- Material constraints: what’s available versus what’s needed
- Space constraints: the physical floor space that you can trust to be available
- Power constraints: understanding energy requirements versus planned usage
- People constraints: the availability of different operators and skill sets across a complex mix of tasks
- Machine constraints: calculating what’s being used, what can be used, and what needs maintenance/repair etc.
More dynamic workflows
A real-time view of the constraints in play may put paid to the ‘perfect/infinite plan’, but it does allow you to constantly refine the schedule in line with real-world conditions. The key of course is making this change process as dynamic and simple to perform as possible. This is another area where APS makes life easier for the modern manufacturer:
- The system offers a ‘live’ Gantt chart that models each job and workflow, including the resources needed to complete them
- Allied to this is a realistic display of how long actual tasks take to complete (compared to what a cost accountant thinks it should)
- When change is required, individual resources (say machines or operators) can be ‘dragged and dropped’ into different workflows – with the results instantly visible
- Most importantly, users can then see the impact of moving resources around, and determine what this means for existing workflows and customer priorities
APS also enables you to say goodbye to less connected forms of planning. Which basically means no more Excel spreadsheets or pieces of paper that together serve to deny any coherent view of progress on the assembly line. It also means an end to the process of creating – typically at the beginning of each week – an infinite plan that’s soon abandoned as it bears no resemblance to what’s really happening day-to-day.
What if…
Another important factor in the battle to create more realistic and relevant plans is ‘what if’ scenarios. In an APS solution, this is where planners can overcome any constraints by quickly modelling different resource allocations.
As a result, you can look to answer questions such as:
- How will delivery dates be affected if we have 10 operators available rather than 5?
- What happens if one of our machines go down?
- How can we optimise storage space to accommodate a rush order?
- Can we free up resource to take on an urgent new job without compromising our existing commitments?
What makes such ‘what-if’ modelling possible is real-time visibility into the plan, the constraints in play, resources needed versus what’s available, and current levels of progress. They can then make changes with confidence, and with one click put any revisions into motion.
From insight to agility
Constraints exist on every shop floor. But with MESTEC you can access APS capabilities as well as a Manufacturing Execution System to help optimise the end-to-end production process. From this level of visibility, you’ll have all the insight needed to monitor the plan, and the rate of (up to the minute) progress against it.
The next step from there is analysing this performance to understand KPIs such as labour utilisation, right first-time levels, scrap rates, and the degree of OTIF orders to further boost productivity. It’s about defeating complexity through transparency, and working to a highly flexible plan that offers the agility needed to succeed in today’s market.
To find out how MESTEC can add an extra dimension to your planning process, simply get in touch.
Click here to start the conversation.
