The criteria for selecting an industrial planning solution
27/02/2023
Reading time: 4 min
Industrial production planning solutions are evolving and offer real advantages over manual tools like Excel. While useful, they have limitations in terms of updating, maintenance, and interactivity.
If you are ready to move to an Industry 4.0 planning solution, it is essential that it meets the unique needs of your business and can evolve with it over time.
To select the right industrial planning tool, you need to consider several criteria:
Flexibility: you need a tool that adapts to your business and your own processes.
Ergonomics and UX: the tool must be easy to use and understand, the interface should be intuitive and user-friendly.
Data handling: the tool must be able to manage and store large amounts of data and secure it.
Integration with other systems: the tool must be able to integrate with other systems, such as ERPs, etc.
Features: you should choose a tool that offers the features you need and that can evolve.
Scalability: the tool must be able to adapt to the growth of your business.
Support: the tool must offer technical support, quality customer service, and documentation that is regularly updated.
Updates: they should be regular and automatic and should allow adaptation to technological changes.
The prerequisites in terms of features
Best practices for production planning include implementing management techniques such as bottleneck management, overall management, pull flow, and other methods to avoid delivery delays, minimize stockout risks, and maximize the use of human and material resources.
Production planning and scheduling are also essential to meet customer delivery deadlines and to control work in progress. It is also important to provide the company with the necessary data so that it can grow and stand out in the market.
Zoom in on key features
A plug & play solution
The selected solution must be able to pull your data directly from the ERP into your interface and be operational and usable within less than a month. The goal will be to achieve a ROI within 3 months to validate your choice.
Multi-site visibility
This is a key feature for visualizing the workload at the group level, quickly identifying overloaded and underloaded industrial sites, and creating your master production plan at the group level as well.
The objective of this feature is to help you enhance decision-making for optimizing your inter-site workload.
The load/capacity simulator
A critically important function for identifying key under-capacity load positions and simulating different capacity scenarios to ensure an optimal service level.
You will also need to validate the simulation with the assumptions to be applied during PDP meetings.
The goal of this function is to reduce your planning time.
Team management
First, you will need to determine the scheduling of your teams across different load positions. Then, you will need to be able to simulate your capacity based on the actual assignment of your teams and then simulate the impact of hiring on capacity (temporary workers, fixed-term contracts, subcontracting, etc.).
This is aimed at improving your teams' productivity.
Management of finished goods inventory
Another key feature will be to determine a target stock for each of your references (or families) and to be alerted each time one of your references reaches a critical threshold. This will allow you to progressively optimize your target coverage levels.
Having this feature in your planning solution will certainly help reduce your WIP and decrease stockouts of finished goods.
Automated scheduling
An automated scheduling feature will not only save you time during the scheduling phase, but also allow you to easily readjust your scheduling based on different customer needs and unforeseen production events. This feature should be based on your scheduling rules (delays, priority, stock...).
Work-in-progress management
This feature allows you to disseminate the operations to be performed for each load position. The queue view is the most appreciated. It allows for quick identification of overloaded load positions to adjust your production.
A tagging system will allow you to tag operators on the tasks they need to perform.
The goal is, of course, to improve your service level and production lead time.
Production monitoring
Being able to monitor your operations directly within your industrial planning solution's interface is a must. You should be able to visualize adherence rates to your production goals for all load positions to notably identify underperforming load positions.
This feature will allow you to boost your adherence rate to production goals.
A dashboard of performance indicators
Finally, to take the pulse of your factories, being able to directly visualize your KPIs in the interface will allow you to identify those that have not progressed as expected, enabling you to adjust your strategies and swiftly change your approach.
This will undoubtedly boost your continuous improvement decision-making (improvement of processes, reduction of lead time, and WIP…).
To conclude
Given the challenges in the industrial sector, the solution you choose must enable you to respond quickly to unforeseen events and provide each player in your production chain with tools to aid in making the best decision.
