Advanced planning and scheduling

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Advanced planning and scheduling (APS, also known as advanced manufacturing) refers to a manufacturing management process by which raw materials and production capacity are optimally allocated to meet demand. [1] APS is especially well-suited to environments where simpler planning methods cannot adequately address complex trade-offs between competing priorities. Production scheduling is intrinsically very difficult due to the (approximately) factorial dependence of the size of the solution space on the number of items/products to be manufactured.

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Difficulty of production planning

Traditional production planning and scheduling systems (such as manufacturing resource planning) use a stepwise procedure to allocate material and production capacity. This approach is simple but cumbersome, and does not readily adapt to changes in demand, resource capacity or material availability. Materials and capacity are planned separately, and many systems do not consider material or capacity constraints, leading to infeasible plans. However, attempts to change to the new system have not always been successful, which has called for the combination of management philosophy with manufacturing.

Unlike previous systems, APS simultaneously plans and schedules production based on available materials, labor and plant capacity.

APS has commonly been applied where one or more of the following conditions are present:

  1. make to order (as distinct from make to stock) manufacturing
  2. capital-intensive production processes, where plant capacity is constrained
  3. products 'competing' for plant capacity: where many different products are produced in each facility
  4. products that require a large number of components or manufacturing tasks
  5. production necessitates frequent schedule changes which cannot be predicted before the event

Advanced planning & scheduling software enables manufacturing scheduling and advanced scheduling optimization within these environments.

Further reading

Related Research Articles

Material requirements planning (MRP) is a production planning, scheduling, and inventory control system used to manage manufacturing processes. Most MRP systems are software-based, but it is possible to conduct MRP by hand as well.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Inventory</span> Goods held for resale

Inventory or stock refers to the goods and materials that a business holds for the ultimate goal of resale, production or utilisation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kanban</span> Japanese business method

Kanban is a scheduling system for lean manufacturing. Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota, developed kanban to improve manufacturing efficiency. The system takes its name from the cards that track production within a factory. Kanban is also known as the Toyota nameplate system in the automotive industry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Product lifecycle</span> Duration of processing of products from inception, to engineering, design & manufacture

In industry, product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its inception through the engineering, design and manufacture, as well as the service and disposal of manufactured products. PLM integrates people, data, processes, and business systems and provides a product information backbone for companies and their extended enterprises.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Manufacturing resource planning</span> Defined as a method for the effective planning of all resources of a manufacturing company

Manufacturingresource planning is a method for the effective planning of all resources of a manufacturing company. Ideally, it addresses operational planning in units, financial planning, and has a simulation capability to answer "what-if" questions and is an extension of closed-loop MRP.

A warehouse management system (WMS) is a set of policies and processes intended to organise the work of a warehouse or distribution centre, and ensure that such a facility can operate efficiently and meet its objectives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Operations management</span> In business operations, controlling the process of production of goods

Operations management is concerned with designing and controlling the production of goods and services, ensuring that businesses are efficient in using resources to meet customer requirements.

A job scheduler is a computer application for controlling unattended background program execution of jobs. This is commonly called batch scheduling, as execution of non-interactive jobs is often called batch processing, though traditional job and batch are distinguished and contrasted; see that page for details. Other synonyms include batch system, distributed resource management system (DRMS), distributed resource manager (DRM), and, commonly today, workload automation (WLA). The data structure of jobs to run is known as the job queue.

Capacity planning is the process of determining the production capacity needed by an organization to meet changing demands for its products. In the context of capacity planning, design capacity is the maximum amount of work that an organization or individual is capable of completing in a given period. Effective capacity is the maximum amount of work that an organization or individual is capable of completing in a given period due to constraints such as quality problems, delays, material handling, etc.

Scheduling is the process of arranging, controlling and optimizing work and workloads in a production process or manufacturing process. Scheduling is used to allocate plant and machinery resources, plan human resources, plan production processes and purchase materials.

Supply-chain operations reference (SCOR) model is a process reference model developed and endorsed by the Supply-Chain Council as the cross-industry, standard diagnostic tool for supply chain management. The SCOR model describes the business activities associated with satisfying a customer's demand, which include plan, source, make, deliver, return and enable. Use of the model includes analyzing the current state of a company's processes and goals, quantifying operational performance, and comparing company performance to benchmark data. SCOR has developed a set of metrics for supply chain performance, and Supply Chain Council members have formed industry groups to collect best practices information that companies can use to elevate their supply chain models.

Backflush accounting is a subset of management accounting focused on types of "postproduction issuing;" It is a product costing approach, used in a Just-In-Time (JIT) operating environment, in which costing is delayed until goods are finished. Backflush accounting delays the recording of costs until after the events have taken place, then standard costs are used to work backwards to 'flush' out the manufacturing costs. The result is that detailed tracking of costs is eliminated. Journal entries to inventory accounts may be delayed until the time of product completion or even the time of sale, and standard costs are used to assign costs to units when journal entries are made. Backflushing transaction has two steps: one step of the transaction reports the produced part which serves to increase the quantity on-hand of the produced part and a second step which relieves the inventory of all the component parts. Component part numbers and quantities-per are taken from the standard bill of material (BOM). This represents a huge saving over the traditional method of a) issuing component parts one at a time, usually to a discrete work order, b) receiving the finished parts into inventory, and c) returning any unused components, one at a time, back into inventory.

Process manufacturing is a branch of manufacturing that is associated with formulas and manufacturing recipes, and can be contrasted with discrete manufacturing, which is concerned with discrete units, bills of materials and the assembly of components. Process manufacturing is also referred to as a 'process industry' which is defined as an industry, such as the chemical or petrochemical industry, that is concerned with the processing of bulk resources into other products.

A master production schedule (MPS) is a plan for individual commodities to be produced in each time period such as production, staffing, inventory, etc. It is usually linked to manufacturing where the plan indicates when and how much of each product will be demanded. This plan quantifies significant processes, parts, and other resources in order to optimize production, to identify bottlenecks, and to anticipate needs and completed goods. Since a MPS drives much factory activity, its accuracy and viability dramatically affect profitability. Typical MPSs are created by software with user tweaking.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Advanced manufacturing</span>

Advanced manufacturing is the use of innovative technology to improve products or processes with modern technology. Advanced manufacturing industries increasingly integrate new innovative technologies in both products and processes. The rate of technology adoption and the ability to use that technology to remain competitive and add value to define the advanced manufacturing sector.

Manufacturing execution systems (MES) are computerized systems used in manufacturing to track and document the transformation of raw materials to finished goods. MES provides information that helps manufacturing decision-makers understand how current conditions on the plant floor can be optimized to improve production output. MES works as real-time monitoring system to enable the control of multiple elements of the production process.

Demand Flow Technology (DFT) is a strategy for defining and deploying business processes in a flow, driven in response to customer demand. DFT is based on a set of applied mathematical tools that are used to connect processes in a flow and link it to daily changes in demand. DFT represents a scientific approach to flow manufacturing for discrete production. It is built on principles of demand pull where customer demand is the central signal to guide factory and office activity in the daily operation. DFT is intended to provide an alternative to schedule-push manufacturing which primarily uses a sales plan and forecast to determine a production schedule.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Production planning</span>

Production planning is the planning of production and manufacturing modules in a company or industry. It utilizes the resource allocation of activities of employees, materials and production capacity, in order to serve different customers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">InoERP</span>

The inoERP enterprise management system is an open-source Go and Flutter based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application which can be used with MySQL, MariaDB or Oracle 12c databases. The objective of inoERP is to provide a dynamic pull based system where the demand /supply changes frequently and traditional planning systems are unable to provide a good inventory turn.

References

[1]

  1. "Fueling the Future with APICS | APICS Magazine". www.apics.org. Retrieved 2018-10-06.