This company operates globally in the chemical industry and traditionally followed a make‑to‑stock policy for all products. This approach led to high inventory levels, significant obsolescence, and frequent stock‑outs, ultimately resulting in customer lead times longer than promised. The project supported the introduction of a make‑to‑order strategy for a substantial portion of the product portfolio with relatively low demand.
To limit the increase in customer lead times for make‑to‑order products, the frequency of production schedule creation was increased from once per week to twice per week. To avoid doubling the planning workload, new scheduling functionality was introduced to automatically generate the production schedule while considering the most critical production constraints. Production schedulers continued to fine‑tune the generated schedule to incorporate additional operational details not yet represented in the system.
After a successful test phase, the scheduling frequency was further increased—from twice weekly to daily—depending on the product group.
In addition to core production constraints such as bottleneck resources, shared resources within the same order, and alignment between reactor and packing schedules, the priority of final demand was also incorporated. When sequencing operations, the priority of the linked independent demand could be used to schedule production orders for sales orders ahead of those producing for forecast when necessary. This demand priority was also displayed in the graphical planning board, providing schedulers with an immediate visual overview.