Industry Solution for Automotives

Initial situation

Individual manufacturing levels can be realized by sub-contractors. In cases of a short term reaction to customer's requests the same questions appear:

• Does the service provider still have capacities for my urgent order?
• Can I shift or reduce other (captive) productions, in order to defuse the shortage? Which consequences will arise from that concerning other costumer (sales) orders?
• Which stock of materials provided is present with the sub-contractor, so that manufacturing can be begun immediately?
• Is there any possibility to activate additional capacities with the sub-contractor? What consequences will arise?
• Is there any possibility to shift the orders of this manufacturing level to another sub-contractor?

Similar questions as for the in-house manufacturing planning are asked. The schedulers are using SCHEDULE++ for planning the production on the premises in order to simulate fast action alternatives and to compile a solution for a short term delivery inquiry. The toll-manufacturing deals with releasing orders without caring about details like available capacities and availability of ordered materials. So it also might be a good idea to use SCHEDULE++ for planning subcontracting.

Problem description

The planning problem can be describes as follows:

• A project with a sub-contractor is getting arranged. A project provides production technology, with which several construction units or groups can be improved.
• An upper limit for capacity is agreed upon. Single or multilevel utilization of the manufacturing equipment may lead to staggered upper limits.
• Appropriate sub-assemblies have to be provided to the manufacturer for treatment. The production scheduler can accumulate an inventory in order to be able to react fast.
• There is an accurately defined date sample for an exchange of construction units and material provided. This sample is taken from transportation restrictions for example.
• A construction unit can be a component of several projects, alternatively it can be improved by different sub-contractors.

Each project needs the answer to the question whether the individual demands can be satisfied in time and volume at an external processing capacity.

Method of resolution

It’s possible to provide schedules for toll-manufacturing as well as for self-produced manufacturing.
In SCHEDULE++ the order of subcontracting is linked to schedule and parts list. Thus, capacity-relevant "production orders" develop. These "production orders" are evaluated in a planning map, where also all manipulations of the providing elements are performed. In the background the system ensures that the correct transactions are implemented in SAP ERP.

Surface

In the upper table of the picture an overview of all projects is shown. Besides the master data of a project there are status messages summarized on a weekly basis. Exceptions are here shown as red crosses. These messages signal the overflow of the weekly capacity or missing materials provided.
In order to inform about the exceptions, two detailing levels are available. In the first level (middle window in the picture) a compression to the individual days of delivery is accomplished. With the value that is aggregated by the day (in the picture, 11049 pieces on Thursday) you can indicate the individual underlying components (lower window in the picture). In these two windows further exception messages are displayed and procedural instructions for the recovery of the conflicts (e.g. rescheduling) are suggested.