INDUSTRIE
Production planning 2.0 in the luxury industry
11/01/2023
Temps de lecture : 3 min
Production planning 2.0 allows for clear scheduling and forecasting of operations across an entire production chain, ensuring that each task flows correctly into the next. It promotes the optimization of available capacity while meeting established deadlines. Good production planning leads to an understanding among all teams about short, medium, and long-term production objectives.
In all luxury trades in leather goods and jewelry (machining, setting, polishing, lapidary, rhodium plating, cutting, gluing, tanning, stitching, binding, assembly, installation…) where the number of production steps is significant, it is essential to pay attention to production planning in order to meet manufacturing deadlines.
The production issues of the luxury industry
The production issues of the luxury industry can be varied. They may concern the quality of products or even respect for the environment and sustainability.
Another common issue lies in the difficulty of accurately forecasting trends and customer needs, particularly in a sector where consumer tastes and preferences can change rapidly. This may involve multiple creations or the rapid growth of certain product lines, necessarily impacting the production chain and its management.
Companies will then need to understand what their capabilities are to meet demand and how to dispatch the production load among their various sites.
They may also face issues of too low service rates, lack of visibility on the position of certain pieces in the workshops, problems of stagnation of certain products, and thus very long production lead times or a lack of visibility on the levels of works in progress in front of workload stations (saturation, under-supply).
Optimize production planning
To address the issues encountered on production sites, luxury sector companies will need an agile decision support tool that can take into account the constraints of each workshop (work-in-progress level, capacity, production unforeseen events).
Production planning 2.0 aims to improve the efficiency and flexibility of production processes by using advanced technologies, such as data analysis, automation, and artificial intelligence. It also provides better visibility and predictability of production activities, which can help luxury companies better manage demand fluctuations and adapt their offerings accordingly.
It allows companies in the sector to better respond to consumer demands for quality, customization, and sustainability, while reducing costs and production times.
Finally, production planning 2.0 can also help strengthen the competitiveness of the luxury industry by enabling it to respond more quickly to market trends and consumer needs.
The two key steps to establish an efficient production plan
In order for your production plan to be adapted to your operations, it is not only necessary to balance the loads as well as the capacities but also to properly schedule the operations to be performed.
The load/capacity balance
The load/capacity balancing involves estimating the resources to be mobilized to meet the production needs of a given period.
The load is the product of the volume of tasks and the time required for each of them ;
The human capacity corresponds to the sum of working days, minus vacations, absences, training…
The machine capacity is the sum of their availabilities, minus planned downtimes and maintenance operations, as well as unexpected downtimes.
By comparing the load and capacity, it is possible to evaluate the ability to produce a range of products and, if necessary, to reject an order or a part of an order or, conversely, to make the necessary capacity available for executing the order.
Scheduling
Once you have ensured that your capacity is in line with your load, there is still a risk of overload at the bottleneck positions. It is then necessary to schedule the operations on your production line.
Scheduling is the arrangement of different operations that allows tasks to be performed sequentially so that the product or project is delivered within the set deadlines. In most cases, scheduling is subject to various constraints, such as the order of operations, which cannot all be performed in parallel. This adds difficulty to the load/capacity matching at different positions.
A good scheduling will allow you to define a precise production calendar at the bottleneck positions, visualize the work in progress in the workshop, and quickly identify underloaded and overloaded positions. You will therefore be able to easily rebalance your capacity and optimize your production.
Review of production planning
Once your planning is established, it is very important to monitor weekly compliance with production objectives daily or weekly depending on operational times. Indeed, a shift in scheduling can impact the entire production chain.
Software such as Oplit will, for example, allow to optimize industrial planning as much as possible and will adapt future plans based on adherence to past objectives. This will reduce production delays, work in progress levels, and production lead times and will increase service rates.
