ePPDS Simplifies System Landscape

The aim of this project was to simplify the system landscape and lower the total cost of ownership related to production scheduling by replacing the production scheduling solutions in ERP and dedicated scheduling systems by one global set of scheduling tools in PPDS. The company has many production facilities in multiple continents. The drive to bring production costs down and the significant (sequence dependent) setup times make an optimal production sequence very important. The weekly supply planning process ensures that at least in the first week after the scheduling horizon (the new week to be scheduled), the requested capacity (in hours) does not exceed available capacity for the most critical production resources. The planned orders generated by the supply planning process in the week after the scheduling horizon are transferred to the production scheduling process This is done on a weekly basis, followed by an automatic generation of the production schedule, taking into account the availability of the bottleneck resources, (sequence dependent) setup times, the availability of shared tools and possibly the availability of labor. This schedule can cover multiple levels in the bill of material and prevents infeasible sequences. The system signals the schedulers for input material shortages. The production schedulers fine tune the generated schedule to also include the remaining restrictions and information not (yet) in the system. As soon as production orders are released, these are transferred to the Manufacturing Execution System (MES) via the ERP system. Production realizations are transferred back to the scheduling system via ERP so that planners always have an up-to-date schedule.