Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS)
Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) is a digital solution that helps manufacturers to
manage production planning and shop floor scheduling. Using advanced algorithms to
balance demand and capacity and generate achievable production schedules, Advanced
Planning and Scheduling (APS) software results in shorter lead times to meet customer
demands and easier, more rapid responses to unexpected production changes.
The two primary components of Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) – strategic
planning and detailed scheduling – help manufacturers anticipate manufacturing resource
needs; orchestrate efficient use of material, people and machines; and deliver valuable
customer service and higher profitability. Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) can be
used for long-term strategic planning covering months and years, medium-term tactical
planning with a few weeks planning horizon, and detailed sequencing and scheduling.
Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) software can be used as a standalone system to
manage planning and scheduling, and can also be integrated with Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP), Manufacturing Execution System (MES), and other software solutions.
Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS)
Functions
APS planning functionality considers forecast and long-term orders, supports decision
making about feasibility and affects the general direction of production operations. Put
simply, Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) supports decisions surrounding extending
the workforce, resource capacity, and factories. It helps manufacturers determine what and
how much to make, where and when to make it, and exactly what resources are required.
Planning can be executed in finite or infinite capacity mode and planning time periods can
be days, weeks, months, or a combination of all three.
Advanced Scheduling functionality considers the availability of resources and additional
constraints, such as tooling and materials to ensure an accurate model of the manufacturing
environment. Advanced Scheduling schedules orders using intelligent built-in rules.
Advanced Scheduling provides decision-making support for overtime, order prioritization,
split production batches, due date negotiation, and order processing.
Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) oversees numerous aspects of a production
environment, including:
Master Production Schedule creation
Bill of Materials (BOM) level planning
Interactive schedule visualization
Make-to-order planning
Make-to-stock planning
Advanced constraint modeling
Advanced material handling
Advance schedule optimization
Assembly process visualization
Interactive schedule viewing
Order-based multi-constraint scheduling
Benefits of Advanced Planning and Scheduling
(APS)
Advanced Planning and Scheduling improves the synchronization of manufacturing
processes and provides greater visibility to increase utilization and on-time delivery while
reducing inventory levels and waste. Its advanced math enables manufacturers to quickly
analyze and calculate achievable production schedules while considering multiple
constraints and business rules. Planners can generate and evaluate what-if scenarios to
achieve the best results.
Additional benefits:
Full visibility and control
Increased utilization and leaner operations
Faster response to change
Better customer service
Higher margins
4 Key Features Of Advanced Planning And
Scheduling Software
Advanced planning and scheduling software is the operations management system
that helps planners and schedulers save what remains of their sanity, after spending
decades attempting to synchronize thousands of manufacturing resources including
machinery, staffing, raw materials, and work in process (WIP) manually.
Advanced planning and scheduling (APS), the process that encompasses advanced
planning and production scheduling is a challenge for even the largest, most
sophisticated enterprise manufacturers. Unfortunately, the complexity of modern
production environments and the pressure on the production planning and
scheduling process will increase as customers' preferences for products with a higher
degree of customization continues to grow.
By now, you have likely realized that it is not possible to manage complex production
processes, manufacture a wide variety of sales orders on time, and reduce production
costs, in excel or with outdated APS tools.
Planning and Scheduling - What's at Stake?
What makes the planning and scheduling process so stressful is that low-quality plans
and schedules can have serious consequences for the manufacturer:
Missed order deadlines (especially critical when related to sales orders placed
by priority customers)
Inaccurate available to promise times
Bottlenecks reducing throughput
Changeovers reducing optimal machine utilization
Planning and scheduling taking a long time
The risks introduced by relying on tribal knowledge
Possible capital expenditure costs that could have been avoided through a
more efficient operation
Advanced planning and scheduling is critical to the success of a manufacturing
operation. But while other key functions like enterprise resource planning (ERP),
manufacturing execution (MES), and material resource planning (MRP) are managed
with the help of sophisticated, dedicated manufacturing software systems, APS is still
done by hand, in excel spreadsheets or at best in outdated software. Why?
Obstacles to Creating the Perfect Plan or Schedule
20 years ago, manufacturers faced some serious limitations when it came to creating
production planning and scheduling software. These challenges seemed so difficult
to overcome that a complete solution was never attempted.
Limitations in Computing Power
First of all, the computer processors available to manufacturers in the last decade did
not have the necessary power to process the complexity of an enterprise production
environment. They didn't have the ability to look through billions of possible
planning/scheduling permutations. This made creating an APS software system that
required a robust processor impossible.
Inability to Fully Model the Production Environment
Even if the processing power had been available, it would have been little use
because there was no means of taking a complex production environment and
convert it into a digital format, a model, that could be processed by a computer.
Once you have a map of the physical environment, including the routings, machines,
workforce, and production resources, you then need to apply production constraints.
You need to digitize the tribal knowledge of your planners and schedulers and
generate machine code for how different types of features/products need to be
processed for maximum efficiency.
Excel certainly doesn't have these modeling capabilities and neither do the simplistic,
visualization-based scheduling solutions. At best these software systems use very
rough estimates. The result was and remains a schedule that will fall apart quickly
once it hits the shop floor for execution.
Optimization Deficiency
Once you have a model and the necessary power to process it, you still need an
engine that will perform the calculations to arrive at the best plan or schedule. Excel
is like a bicycle. It has no engine of its own and relies on the planner or scheduler's
brainpower to come up with an optimal plan or schedule. Excel provides some
leverage and structure, but that is not enough.
Simplistic heuristic solutions have a limited engine that takes shortcuts. This engine
does not have the sophisticated algorithms needed to compare each possibility to the
next and then decide which one is best. So it considers just a fraction of the total
solution space and arrives at a sub-optimal plan or schedule.
Heuristic solutions will therefore come up with a plan or schedule that requires
manual adjustment. That is why most APS systems come with robust visual
interfaces that are designed to help you drag and drop orders. It is expected that
your planning/scheduling team will need to rework the plan manually before it can be
executed. In many cases, reworking the plan generated by a heuristic tool can take
even longer than generating a fresh plan in excel.
Slow Planning and Scheduling
Enterprise manufacturers need true optimization, the ability to consider all the
possibilities to arrive at the best plan or schedule. But even when the processing
power, modeling capabilities, and algorithms needed for optimization became
available, this process proved to be too slow. It would take hours to produce a plan
or schedule with last-generation optimization software. In that time, the production
environment would change and the generated plan would become obsolete the
moment it is was created. The algorithms powering the optimization-driven software
solutions were just too slow and manufacturers were forced to make do with excel
and heuristic solutions.
Solving An Impossible Planning and Scheduling Problem
20 years ago, one of the biggest tier 1 automotive manufactures, with one of the
most complex production environments, decided to look for a scheduling solution,
that could produce automated plans and schedules, accurately and quickly.
At the time, the prevailing sentiment was that the planning and scheduling problems
were impossible to solve. But this manufacturer decided to reach out to a wide
variety of planning and scheduling vendors to see if there were any viable solutions
on the market.
To their surprise, in a head-to-head competition with their native scheduling system,
an innovative, constraint-based optimization APS solution generated plans and
schedules that:
decreased planning/scheduling time by 90%
increased throughput by 10%
reduced delivery lead time by 50%
reduced changeovers by 25%
reduced finished good inventories by 33%
How Does Modern Advanced Planning and Scheduling
Software Work?
If the advanced planning and scheduling problems were deemed impossible, then
how are modern APS able to generate plans and schedules quickly and accurately?
20 years ago, a team of engineers decided to solve each of the 4 APS limitations.
Each solution was a significant breakthrough. But when they combined these
solutions in an APS software system they create a leap forward in advanced planning
and scheduling technology.
Modeling the Production Environment with a Robust Constraint
Library
Fortunately, silicon valley helped the engineers solved the first problem by producing
the computer chips that had the necessary power to run the production planning and
scheduling calculations. But long after the computing power of the average server
was more than sufficient to run just about any APS system, modeling the production
environment remained a challenge.
The second innovation to the APS space was the introduction of a constraint library.
This modeling system allows a planner or scheduler to configure the entire
production environment and all the constraints through a simple drag and drop
interface, without the need for custom coding.
What makes the constraint library so powerful is that it is dynamic. Any time a new
type of constraint, process, or facility element is encountered, it is added to the
constraint library and made available to all the customers. And after helping
hundreds of factories around the world model their production environments, the
way that this library is used and the training offered to new customers becomes even
more streamlined and efficient.
Today, the constraint library allows planners and schedulers to model any element of
their production environment, including any disruptive changes in minutes.
True Optimization with Patent Algorithms
The rich, detailed model is fed to an optimization engine. The optimization engine
consists of sophisticated algorithms that compare each possible schedule or plan to
billions of possible variations and determines the very best one. This is a very
complex process and the patented APS algorithms that make this possible are a
recent invention. The application of advanced mathematics to APS was the third
breakthrough that makes modern advanced planning and scheduling software
possible.
Optimization at the Speed of Modern Manufacturing
Not only are the algorithms able to conduct these intricate mathematic operations at
scale, but they are also able to do this quickly ... hundreds of times more quickly than
in the past. Instead of taking hours to create a plan or schedule, one is created in
minutes. With the help of in-memory databases, it is even possible to complete these
calculations in seconds for real-time applications. The speed of modern optimization
engines allows planners and schedulers to test what-if scenarios and respond quickly
to disruptions in the production environment.
