FDBusiness.com

By Filip Schiettecat, Senior Director Industry Management at Siemens PLM Software.

The food and beverage industry faces a set of unique demands that, when combined together, result in an environment that is particularly challenging for planning and scheduling.

Challenges

* Variation in raw materials and demand – Seasonality and reliance on crop yields means that the quantity and quality of raw materials and demand can fluctuate a lot.  The planner needs to be in a position to plan for many eventualities and respond easily to the current situation.

* Short shelf life – Perishable materials and produce mean that it is essential to optimize the timing of production to avoid wastage.

* Strong price pressure from customers – In order to remain profitable in the face of pressure to reduce prices, it is necessary to ensure that the production process is running as efficiently as possible.

* Complex quality and packaging requirements – It is often the case that there are complex relationships between the grade of the goods and their suitability for particular customers or product lines.

* Complexity of production process – A mixture of discrete and process production modes can result in complex planning and scheduling requirements, often with contradicting goals for different parts of the process.

The Siemens solution for Planning and Scheduling is Preactor APS, a collection of software offerings comprising Advanced Planning (AP) and Advanced Scheduling (AS) products.

Filip Schiettecat, Senior Director Industry Management at Siemens PLM Software.

For companies who are in a volatile, make to stock environment and require a more dependable method to plan capacity and stock, Preactor AP offers a planning tool that has the convenience of spreadsheets but with interactive graphs to give the user full control over the results.

Preactor AS allows you to gain greater visibility and understanding of your manufacturing processes, and with it greater control of those processes, allowing better machine utilization, on-time delivery, impact analysis of ‘what if’ scenarios and identification of bottlenecks to give a few examples. Preactor AS is also suited to non-manufacturing environments, given that the principles of resources constraints are applicable across many industry sectors.

Unlike spreadsheets and other applications that are relied upon to produce long term MPS data that in turn dictates purchasing decisions, Preactor is suitable for working with large amounts of data, supports both constrained and unconstrained production, and provides a tool to perform ‘what if’ calculations with alternative scenarios that can deliver true cost reductions where it matters.

Focus on a leader in chocolates

Challenges

* Capture shop floor data in real time

* Improve transparency and communication among Departments

* Make decisions in a more flexible, accurate and efficient way

* Improve visibility across the whole supply chain

* Optimize manufacturing processes.

Results

* Faster sequencing of production orders

* More accurate production planning

* Improvement of production master plans update

* Enhanced communications among departments

* Saved 16 hours of planner resources each week

* Increase contribution to service level from 97.8 to 98.5 percent.

Focus on worldwide Cognac producer

Challenges

* Plan the year-round work of all teams

* Organize the arrivals and exits of barrels

* Streamline scheduling for efficient barrel-to-shelf process.

Results

* Realized a 12 percent increase in productivity

* Eliminated late deliveries of eau de vie to assembly sites

* Decreased amount of travel from storage sites

* Automatically generated reports.

Siemens Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) software offers a holistic solution that enables you to implement your strategy for the complete digitalization of manufacturing operations. Our portfolio provides end-to-end visibility into production allowing decision makers to readily identify areas to be improved within both the product design and associated manufacturing processes, and make the necessary operational adjustments for smoother and more efficient production.

Our products provide solutions for:

* Advanced Planning and Scheduling

* Manufacturing Execution

* Quality Management

* Manufacturing Intelligence

* Formulated Product Design.

Download a free license here and try the capabilities for an advanced manufacturing planning.