Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) System of synchronous production planning

Distinctive characteristics of APS systems

• Integration of designing of production on Wednesday of supply chain planning.
• Orientation of the production schedule first of all on need of end consumers (forecasts, orders) and their possible attraction to process of creation of the plan, accounting of opportunities of production and delivery time of materials and component parts by suppliers.
• Synchronization of plans regionally of the separated production sites and the distributor centers means.

Advantages of APS systems

The most part of APS systems supports web-centric technologies which guarantee a possibility of remote work with plans  — visualization of the plan, introduction of customer orders, viewing reports  , etc. Together with it restriction of functions and user rights for remote work is possible. One of the main advantages  is an existence of the powerful instrument of visualization and the report generator. The APS systems give to users convenient means of the analysis of planned information  — different diagrams, charts (for example, the interactive chart Ganta, diagrams of loading of machines and resources, warehouse stocks, work in progress volume  , etc.), a broad set of the built-in reports and also an opportunity to create the user reports. APS systems are capable to work as separately, and together with the existing information environment of the enterprise (for example, ERP- APS-MES).

APS basic components

• Approval of requirements plans in materials and production capacities at the same time. Such approach has the name of synchronous planning as operation algorithms of APS perform calculation necessary to purchase and production of products, executing it taking into account the existing (limited) capacities, i.e. synchronously.
• Detailing and the accuracy of model of production and supply chains are at the high level. Creation of the implementable plan is the main task of planning process, i.e. it should be the plan which can be executed. Accuracy of the plan depends generally on that, restrictions of production and a supply chain, generally were how accurately simulated. The data model of an APS system assumes a possibility of accounting when planning detailed characteristics of specific items of equipment, the state, vehicles, process flows  , etc.
• Creation of plans with high speed. One of the main characteristics of APS - a system is a speed which is reached thanks to the fact that all data model remains in RAM of the server. The opportunity of efficiency of replanning and, therefore, a possibility of quick response to different changes in a supply chain is given.
• Collective work of external and internal participants in unified multi-user environment is widely used. As APS applications are web-centric the possibility of cooperation of users of a system and approval of plans between different divisions in the enterprise and with other participants of process beyond its limits is provided.

Features of the solution APS

• Possibility of application to different environments of planning. Systems which are based on the MRP II standard are guided in most cases by discrete production with the type "assembly to order", "make-to-stock production". APS systems are also capable to consider and specifics of "production under the order", to plan continued production.
• Synchronous planning. It is also the main difference from the MRP II standard. Purchase planning and productions is made along with accounting of restrictions on capacities and resources (machines, tools, people) while in the MRP II systems planning processes of required materials and necessary resources (capacities) are separated and are executed iteratsionno for receiving a realistic plan. As a result, it has an impact on the speed of the procedure of planning.
• Optimization planning. Optimization in the APS systems is based on evristika and on the difficult mathematical samples created for specific industry (for example, metallurgy, rolling  — optimization of size variations of sheets), the specific enterprise. At the same time thin setup of algorithms of optimization can be performed by directly users.
• The high speed of creation of plans reached because data remain in RAM.
• Immediate response to change of the environment. Unforeseen changes in the external environment (for example, canceling of orders), in the environment of production (hardware failure) which can make the created plan unrealizable operational re-planning, accounting of restrictions (and statuses) supply chains provide an opportunity in a short space of time to receive the new plan corrected proceeding from new realities.
• The distributed planning. The separate APS systems support the distributed planning by means of which several people can synchronously plan, but each of them bears responsibility for some certain zone of planning (or it is separate machines, or it is a certain planning horizon).

APS systems available in Russia

• The directory of APS solutions and projects is available to this address
• Ortems APS
• Institute of Model Solutions: Process production
• Advanced Manufacturing Management
• Raytstep SPM - Schedule system and Monitoring of Lean SCMo ERP

See Also

ERP

MRP

MES

Links

APS systems, Operational planning

Standard module of APS Galica AG