Completed WMS projects
Philipp Boecker + Wender Band Stahl GmbH & Co. KG
Conception of an integrated tool for detailed production planning
Branch
- Metal- and plasticsworking industry
The Team warehouse logistics was asked by Philipp Boecker + Wender Band Stahl GmbH & Co. KG (BWS) to develop a production planning tool for the computer-aided planning, supervision and control of the strip metal production. BWS provides steel and precision tapes all over Europe and is well-known for its customized products, high service degree and relatively small lot sizes. It also is Germany’s leading supplier of service tapes.
Reason and goal
In order to ensure the readiness to deliver and to improve the informative value of time schedules BWS decided to develop a planning tool which allows to give feasible delivery dates as well as realtime requirement requests to the warehouse management and to represent the current situation in the factory by means of a permanent target/actual comparison. The aim was the extracted and manipulable preparation of all data which are relevant for the production planning. The following two planning levels have to be considered:
- 1. During the first planning step released but still not allocated orders can be dispatched and roughly planned.
- 2. The second planning step represents the detailed planning where the orders are allocated.
Analysis of the actual situation and weak points
In a first step, based on factory inspections, interviews and moderated workshops, all production-related information and material flows are recorded and the actual situation is presented in detail. The presentation and evaluation mainly considers functional, performance, cost and flexibility-related aspects based on the recorded processes and the data analysis.
Conception
The production planning tool was developed according to the business process model. This tool primarily enables the work preparation to plan the production in all factories and to supervise or control the actual production status. An integrated feedback loop via the BDE data initiates a permanent actual/target comparison (actual = planning; target = production). In case of deviations from the plan the work preparation is informed automatically. Furthermore, the manually optimized allocation, load, set-up and working times of the cost centers should be facilitated. In addition to this, the system should optimize the production orders according to throughput times, order sequence or capacity utilization. It should also be possible to request finishing dates and to differentiate between material and process-oriented production strategies when entering the production jobs. This should increase the accuracy of the time schedules (finishing date and material requirement dates) and allow for a realtime planning.
Result
The functional requirements on the “integrated production planning tool iF“ were summarized in a requirements specification which can also be used for tenders.
