The operational approach to industrial production planning
02/07/2023
In order to make a 360° assessment of industrial production planning, Michael Valentin, associate director at OPEO, reviews with Thibaut Wilhelm, CEO of Oplit, the different needs and operational areas of today's industrialists.
Freeing oneself from bureaucracy
Some things are classic but are still extremely important.
The first is how to free oneself from bureaucracy. This is not specific to industrial production planning, but still.
I have seen nearly two hundred fifty sites since the beginning of my career. Each time, I like to spend time with planners and schedulers. These are jobs that I find fascinating, which are really at the heart of all manufacturing.
And these people, it’s just incredible what they have in their heads. They have a whole bunch of things that they can’t put on paper, but only they know them. So there is an enormous mental load due to all the constraints related to manufacturing and the constraints that come from customers and products. And on top of that, they are generally not helped by their tools. They are the world champions of Excel pivot tables.
They have to cross-reference data coming from the ERP, sometimes from the MES, sometimes from files created by quality, because there have been delays and action plans to catch up. In short, it’s hell.
Just recently, I met a planner in luxury who was working in a tannery, and in fact the main pain point was, of course, to obviously improve the competitiveness of the site, but it is also to free her from these tasks, because it’s like they are rare resources, and if you don’t do something to make these people feel better in their shoes, you run the risk that they throw in the towel, go elsewhere, or change careers.
So retaining these resources is hyper important. Fostering the transmission of their knowledge as well, and to do this, they absolutely need to be equipped much more. And with digital and solutions like Oplit, there are tools that allow this to happen.
Giving autonomy to teams
Next, the second topic concerns team autonomy, particularly on the production side. It simply needs to be clear what the priority is, for everyone and at all times, and that organizations potentially organize themselves, so that the teams are agile.
Facilitating decision making
And the last operational point is the facilitation of decision-making at all levels. It’s about optimizing a sequence, knowing that a certain product is going to arrive quickly, and that I won't have set up my machine because it is on the upstream station just before and will arrive in an hour. It’s knowing that I will have a load wall in two or three months and that I need to hire people. It's knowing that a certain order or client has become urgent, and is a fast track.
All of these things really help optimize the site's performance. But the key to success is that decisions can be made as low as possible. Organizations that dysfunction in this area are those where all decisions are made at the top, being too far from the constraints of the field and the realities experienced by operators at the machine level.
We need to facilitate (and digital is a great vector for that) decision-making so that it can be made at the lowest level and that people are aware of what will happen to them in a week or tomorrow. And if you don't have the right management rules, everyone organizes locally, which is logical and intelligent, but then you don't optimize globally.
So ensuring that decisions are made correctly, at the right level, that they are shared and collaborative, is a huge challenge in the planning of industrial production.
And having good rules for field flows can help a lot. Limiting work-in-progress by employing just-in-time is a good option. Now, with digital and CONWIP systems, it ensures that we operate with stable work-in-progress. And then, everything is much easier to manage because we make decisions based on potentials that are not as exponential as if we let all work-in-progress in, otherwise there would be so many possible options that everyone would be lost.
