Production scheduling
Infeasible supply plan
The production proposals (planned orders) as these have been generated by the supply planning process usually do not take into account any restrictions in production in case MRP was used or only take into account the most important restriction(s) in case an optimizer was used. In both cases the production plan resulting from the supply planning process is by far not feasible. And an infeasible production plan affects many processes. First of all the production department must make choices which planned orders to process first in case of overloads. Without clear guidance it is likely that choices are made which are not optimal from a company wide perspective. As long as the infeasible production planning exists, the related purchase plan is not reliable either. Further, committing sales orders against this infeasible planning will result in promises you cannot keep. Off course it is possible to translate the infinite supply plan to a feasible production plan by planners every planning cycle again (usually weekly) but this requires significant manual effort and throughput time.
Generate feasible production schedule
Therefore, a scheduling tool which can automatically generate a decent proposal for a feasible production plan is vital for many production companies. SAP S/4HANA ePPDS ® is such scheduling tool which is embedded in S/4HANA ® and is thus fully integrated with processes like supply planning, purchasing and sales order confirmation. It will not only increase the efficiency of the generation of the production plan but also benefits a reliable forecast towards suppliers and reliable sales order confirmations towards customers.
Examples of production related restrictions which can be taken into account:
- Availability of resources throughout a day
- Normal non-availability related to breaks and cleaning
- Scheduled downtimes for maintenance
- Preferred and alternative machines
- A frozen horizon (horizon where no automatic but only manual changes are allowed)
- Setup times (fixed or sequence dependent)
- Predefining windows for products with the same scheduling properties to prevent setup time (production wheel)
- Allowed window between consecutive operations in the same orders
- Align the start of a planner order for a finished product with the end of the planned order of the semi-finished product
