Production campaing planning

ORSOFT Manufacturing Workbench (MWB): Functionalities of production sequence planning

Implementing production campaigns is one of the key disciplines of production sequence planning, hence playing an increasingly important role in the entire process industry – particularly in the chemical, pharmaceutical and food industries.

A production campaign (a grouping, an order network, an aggregated cascade) is a linkage of production orders from the central ERP (e.g. SAP production and/or process orders) comprising the same and/or different material numbers. Cascades, in turn, are classified as an additional characteristic of production sequencing, whereas those are described as a grouping of productions that build on one another. Both functions are controlled within advanced planning & scheduling.

How production campaign planning actually works

The planning of production campaigns is about order scheduling according to predefined criteria in a way that relationships and offset times become involved. Both, orders and several production campaigns can be combined into one production campaign.

For the need to combine orders, master recipes are often modelled. They reflect

    • the duration and arrangement of processes that occupy resources (equipment) and
    • material flows in terms of type, quantity and scheduling.

These master recipes may form the basis to derive orders, which describe the allocation of processes to resources and the material flow in time and space.

One of the major tasks of production campaign planning: rescheduling orders in their entirety

Production planners often have to ensure that a large number of orders have to be rescheduled as a whole to prevent negative influences on material provisions. ORSOFT therefore enables horizontal and vertical campaign planning or a combination thereof.

Horizontal production campaign

Several orders/batches of a material as well as orders in the same production area can be rescheduled in-line

Vertical production campaign

Orders over several production stages can be linked to enable fixed material provisioning, even with make-to-stock production

ORSOFT Manufacturing Workbench | Advantages of production campaign planning

  • Grouping of orders based on predefined criteria and planning of these orders as such
  • Manual/automated creation of production campaigns and their finite/infinite rescheduling
  • Keeping complex production structures as one
  • Fixation of preferred production sequences and avoidance of interruptions during rescheduling
  • Automatic creation of blocking orders / set-up and cleaning orders according to defined rules
  • Dependencies are displayed transparently in the general view for the orders within the production campaign
  • Avoidance of sequence violations during planning
  • Aggregated ATP (available to promise) across all orders within a production campaign
  • Consideration of various boundary conditions such as minimum and maximum intermediate storage/maturing (of pre-products), of secondary resources, equipment and personnel and of several upstream or downstream restrictions and production steps

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Ulf Matthias
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