With the increase in the demand for customization and the expansion of mass customization, production to order is taking on an increasingly important role in the production landscape. The demand for customized products is growing in a market that is rapidly changing and becoming more and more demanding in terms of reliability, speed and flexibility.
The production to order find today themselves managing their natural complexity alongside it with increasingly higher performance objectives. Controlling and managing production in the best possible way becomes the key to compete and respond to this market. Having unsuitable tools in this period can easily and suddenly lead to severe delays in deliveries, numerous missing items (despite high WIP values) and strong inefficiencies, especially in terms of On-Time Delivery. Equipping yourself with the appropriate tools will put the company in a position of strong advantage over companies that will not have grasped the changes and challenges of the market in time.
In production to order, the entire production cycle is customer-oriented and therefore managed around it. Only after receipt of the order begins the supply cycle of raw materials, production processes and possibly the engineering drawing in the case of ETO (Engineering to Order).
To obtain all these results it is therefore essential to have tools capable of giving maximum visibility on the company supply chain, to align resources with market demands. Many companies are convinced that they plan with their own management software for which they have invested time and money but in most cases it is not so. We often notice this when the On-Time Delivery level has now dropped, the costs in the warehouse have risen and in production there is a continuous work in an emergency.
Many companies that produce to order start by planning the production on the company management system, and then move gradually to plan on Excel and Project. These two tools are used for planning to increase flexibility and make their data in graphic format and therefore more easily understandable. But at the same time they allow to process only a part of the data necessary for planning to order and are not integrated into the management system or between them. These shortcomings create huge manual work over time, leading to approximate results and unable to align the activities of the various areas (technical office, purchasing, production and sales).
Over time, these tools to support planning processes lead to work for emergencies causing a drop in on-time delivery and despite an increase in warehouse costs, missing materials and therefore machine downtime are becoming more and more frequent. Poor production visibility renders the planning team unable to make effective decisions, with the risk of major emergencies leading to cost and delivery delays.
These difficulties can be effectively eliminated by giving your planning department the right tools that allow you to have full visibility of the production, working on all the necessary data while remaining integrated into your management system. The solution that has proven to be able to give the best management and control capabilities of production to order is the one based on the use of an Advanced Planning System (APS).
Today it is possible to greatly improve the governance capacity of companies that operate on order through the extension of the capabilities of the ERP used with an APS solution.
APS is a software application that supports the decision-making process for the creation of production and purchasing plans. Through advanced mathematical algorithms, it allows to simulate the entire factory allowing to anticipate possible problems
and react in time to solve them before they occur. APS is the tool that allows the planner to:
The plans generated by an APS are of high quality and require much less manual activity on the part of the planner to be generated and maintained.
On-Time Delivery performance refers to the calculation of the ratio between the sales order lines shipped by the delivery date requested by the customer (or promised to the customer) and the total number of sales order lines. Usually this value is expressed as a percentage and can be calculated over different measurement periods.
CyberPlan is a powerful and innovative APS that since 1991 has supported the planning and scheduling of the production of thousands of companies all over the world: companies ranging from small-medium enterprises typical of the Italian territory to the large multinational overseas.
Every day these companies face unexpected events and changes in production scenarios thanks to the APS solution, guaranteeing management compliance with fundamental KPIs such as On-Time Delivery or the turnover rate of materials.
Cybertec's solution has been officially certified by the DDI, but it doesn't stop there. In fact, CyberPlan was certified as DDMRP software at its first evaluation, which happened in very rare cases and which was publicly praised by Chad Smith, founder of DDI. Obtaining the certification with full marks, at the first evaluation, demonstrates the goodness of the solution and the maturity of the logics and techniques it uses. This is a guarantee of operation and result that allows you to choose CyberPlan with the security of a reliable and professional partner.
Many companies that produce to order use CyberPlan to increase their competitiveness on the market. Companies such as Ansaldo Energia, General Electric (Baker Hughes), ABB, Siemens Trasformers, Breton, Cefla and many others. Find out how to achieve On-time delivery in production to order by downloading the free guide.
Contact software experts and ask them more information to understand what you need and what fits best your company.