BOM Level Planning

The planning Bill of Materials (BOM) can be exploded, and then the production plan for lower level items is calculated in the same way. Based on the MOM explosion and the production plan, proposed material purchase requirements can be exported to an ERP system or Excel for action.

Interactive Schedule Visualization

By creating initial Master Production Schedule (MPS), data can be displayed as stock profile graphs and capacity usage graphs. The MPS can be changed by simply clicking and dragging a point on the stock or capacity graphs, and the production of a particular item can be moved from one planning period to another.

Make-To-Order Planning

In a make-to-order environment, stock levels of finished and intermediate items will not be part of the key process parameters. But there will still be the need to evaluate the effects of future demand changes on the manufacturing process. When a change in demand occurs, whether in terms of quantity or delivery dates, there is a need to be able to quickly assess if it is possible to meet the new requirements.

Make-to-Stock Planning

Generate accurate and achievable master production schedules (MPS) considering rough cut capacity, pack forward figures, target days of stock cover, manufacturing preferences, minimum and maximum re-order quantities, re-order multiples and product shelf life. Production capacity can be specified as a quantity, duration or weight. By using the Preactor calendar system capacity, production capacity can be varied over time

Advanced Constraint Modeling

Model advanced resource constraints, such as rules about concurrent rule usage, and advanced inter-operation constraints including limits on the time between operations and how much operation times can be extended.

Advanced Material Handling

Implement custom rules about how materials are consumed to ensure that sub-assemblies and raw materials are consumed according to business rules. When allocating materials, the system filters and ranks data to allow quality-related or customer-specific material usage constraints to be accounted for.

Advanced Schedule Optimization

Define additional schedule optimization rules to deal with problems such as minimizing changeover times, preferred sequencing and campaigning. Composite rules can be built with the SIMATIC IT Preactor workflow tool.

Assembly Process Visualization

Visualize the assembly process from raw materials through to finished goods and sales orders in the Material Explorer. This shows a graphical view of the material dependencies as well as plots of stock levels over time. See where shortages will occur and choose to keep them as a constraint, or ignore them.

Interactive Schedule Viewing

Viewers can be used in the sales office to track the progress of orders and carry out order inquiries against a read-only copy of the published schedule. Management can use them to compare actual times with scheduled completion times to assess performance of the production process. Viewers can be used on a shop floor PC to provide the cell supervisor or machine operator with up-to-the-minute work-to-lists generated by the scheduling system.

Order Based Multi-Constraint Scheduling

Create order based schedules and apply a ranking or weighting in order to prioritize orders. The software schedules based on availability of resources, additional constraints and materials required for the order. Create schedules taking in to account different operation run speeds on different resources, use sequence dependent changeover times based on operation attributes, and allow overlaps and slack time between operations.