Production Planning

Visibility. A key feature of Production Planning is the material flow visibility provided to your planners via intuitive planning workbenches. This provides support for production bottleneck identification and management. This provides projected inventory levels across the horizon for any finished good, intermediate materials or raw materials. The workbenches highlight projected utilization of production equipment highlighting exceptions in a smart graphical manner. Production Planning visibility works across time fences simultaneously providing key information by day, week, or month. Production Planning visibility provides exception-based planning with graphical alerts to identify and resolve issues such as capacity and material violations, shelf life violations, and late orders.

Constraint based optimization. Synchronize your material flow and resource utilization across multistage, multisite production environments respecting all required constraints. Such constraints may include sourcing constraints, lead times, batch sizes, minimum/maximum run times/lengths, changeover provision, tools, labor shifts, utilities, and key skills. The Production Planning solution provides a hybrid of cost and heuristics optimization methods to ensure that the calculated plans are feasible, optimal, and most of all realistic.

Simulation. Production Planning provides a simulation workbench for what-if scenarios and simulation planning. This easily enables your planner to assess the impact of changes to capacity, run rate/efficiency, or alternate demand plans.

Planning methodologies. Production Planning supports a range of planning methods. These include finite capacity APS/MRPII for forecast driven planning, lean manufacturing/Kanban for automotive and theory of constraints. Production Planning supports finite capacity backward- and forward-planning models.

S&OP support. Production Planning automatically makes supply plans and simulated scenarios available to your S&OP/IBP processes for tactical planning.

Capacity allocation. The solution uses a range of heuristics and optimization techniques to ensure the correct demand is met. Production Planning fully supports supply chain segmentation strategies. Capacity and materials may be allocated based on a large number of factors that includes: market segment, customer priority, revenue/margin, and demand type (including forecast, orders, safety stock, and other demand signals).

Pegging. Costs and orders can be pegged at all levels of demand and supply throughout the planning model.

Multiple-site. The solution may be deployed across multiple production facilities providing capacity and material checking and stock allocation in a true multi-site environment.

Shelf life and lot tracking. Production Planning respects shelf life constraints on perishable materials reducing waste and providing lower cost plans. Production Planning supports the flow of materials by lot ensuring planned inventories are managed at a micro-level.

Order promising. The solution calculates available to promise, capable to promise, and order to promise in real time.

Connectivity. Production Planning has the ability to align with a PLM system for bill of material (BOM) and engineering changes, MES system for actual production, and LIMs systems for quality specifications.

Cloud deployment.  Production Planning is available in the QAD Cloud or AWS public cloud. Both options provide a secure, reliable, and extensive cloud infrastructure.

Mobility. The Production Planning user experience supports Web, mobile and touch screen user interfaces.

Analytics. As IoT and machine learning deliver a greater number of data points, supply chain solutions must have a best-in-class capability to translate data into trends and decision grade analytics. Production Planning seamlessly embeds capability from Qlik, a leading business analytics provider. This provides an intelligent and intuitive user experience supporting responsive and accurate decision making.

In-Memory. Production Planning uses a highly scalable, rapid in-memory data model enabling real-time simulation planning and effective decision support.

Integration. QAD DSCP supports integration with QAD, SAP, Sage, JDE, Oracle, Infor, Microsoft and many other ERP and enterprise applications. It uses a data hub approach to exchange supply chain information across the organization and includes a tool for building custom integrations.