PPDS Enables Make-to-Order

This company has global presence and operates in the chemical industry. The policy was to deliver all products from stock (make-to-stock). This resulted in high inventory levels, high obsolescence and stock outs leading to longer than promised customer lead-times. The project was to support the introduction of the make-to-order concept for a significant part of the product portfolio with relatively low demand. In order to limit the increase of customer order lead-times for the make-to-order products, the frequency by which the production schedule was created was increased from once per week to two times per week. To prevent doubling the planning effort, new scheduling functionality was introduced to generate the production schedule and take into account the most important production restrictions. Fine tuning of this generated schedule remains the task of the production schedulers. After a successful test period, the generation of the production schedule was further increased from twice a week to up to every working day, depending on the product group. Besides taking into account production restrictions like bottleneck resources, other resources in the same planned order and aligning the packing schedule with the reactor schedule, the priority of the final demand was considered. In sequencing the operations, the priority of the linked (independent) demand can be considered so that production orders producing for sales orders can be scheduled earlier than productions orders producing for forecast. The linked demand priority of the scheduled operations can also be displayed in the graphical planning board to obtain an immediate overview.