Using 
For Strategic, Tactical & Operational Planning
In today’s highly competitive world, there
is an increasing pressure for companies to concentrate on continuous
improvements. In the manufacturing environment this means that companies
will often review their factory layouts or the way in which the
factory is controlled and managed. At a higher level, companies
reviewing their supply chains will often review which factories
or which production lines will be required to best service their
customers. The reviewer will often need to incorporate some details
on how the factories organise their production.
It is normal to plan at several different levels.
The planning process will often start with a long term plan –
with a time horizon measured in months or years. As the time horizon
reduces, the plan becomes more detailed. It is critical, however,
to ensure that these levels are integrated and that compatible information
is used throughout Orchestrate assists with all levels of the planning
process and offers seamless integration between the various planning
levels.
With Orchestrate we can start by generating a long
term plan. Orchestrate will use its various data tables to automatically
allocate production orders into periods of time or “buckets”.
When all the demand has been allocated it is likely that some of
the buckets will be overloaded. It is also possible that there may
be sufficient capacity on the main resource but the plan may not
be achievable because of a lack of a secondary resource such as
labour.
Orchestrate can either highlight the problem areas
to the planner or can automatically go through a smoothing process
to move demand from one resource to another or from one time period
to another. Many of our customers like to take ownership of any
overload problems and therefore prefer to do the smoothing process
via Orchestrate’s drag and drop interface.
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Potentially a production plan where there are no overloads can be
achieved by moving production from its initially allocated bucket
to either an earlier bucket on the same resource or to an alternative
resource. There are many different rules which can govern and constrain
the moving of demand in this way including the availability of secondary
resources.
Because Orchestrate uses detailed information throughout
its planning levels, once a smoothed plan has been achieved, Orchestrates
powerful sequencing capabilities can be used to provide detailed
production plans.
For example we can take the next two time periods
and produce a detailed sequence.
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