Tightening up production planning
In early 2015, with the Optimity Demand Forecaster project running successfully, it was time to go to work on the factory planning solution. After six months, Optimity´s Supply Chain Optimizer was implemented and rolled out on five production lines.
As with the forecasting initiative a year earlier, there was a change in the focus of the project. The initial idea had been to implement a solution for detailed floor scheduling. But after some discussions, TSS decided again to focus efforts at a higher level, putting in place a solid weekly production planning solution.
“The cost-benefit for us to implement a really good weekly planning solution clearly outweighed the additional investment required to implement a detailed shop floor solution, where a lot more parameters and constraints had to be taken into account. We opted for a process where we refresh our weekly production plan every night, taking into account any changes in materials availability, shop floor capacity and any new customer orders. This gives us both the short-term accuracy we need to run the plant efficiently, as well as longer-term visibility (26 weeks) – enough time for us to properly plan for both plant capacity adjustments and materials acquisition,” says Mattias.
Jimmy Bertilsson, Purchasing Manager at TSS highlights another benefit of the new solution, “The visual components of Optimity’s solutions make the plans much more accessible. Our ERP solution presents everything as text and numbers. Optimity is completely different, as it conveys the most critical planning information in a very intuitive, graphical way. This really helps the communication within the business.”
Taking the guesswork out of planning
With Optimity Demand Forecaster and Supply Chain Optimizer both well-established at TSS, Mattias and Jimmy can look back on two successful rollouts.
Mattias summarises the journey, “We’ve come such a long way. We used to try to deal with so many materials that in the end we barely knew what to produce. We now have a complete solution telling us how many length-meters we should produce every week for each product. The plan is always up-to-date, based on real capacity constraints, and actual material availability. Guesswork is no longer part of the equation.”