Optimize and Automate Your Planning and Scheduling With Blue Yonde
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Optimize and Automate Your Planning and Scheduling With Blue Yonder
Optimize and Automate Your Planning and Scheduling With Blue Yonde
Ute Strohmaier, 2 minute read
Manufacturers of cars and trucks — as well as other large-scale manufacturing enterprises — face tough challenges. With their high capital investments, long lead times and rising operations costs, they’ve been hit especially hard by the disruptions that characterize all supply chains today. From extreme weather to materials shortages, disruptions are constantly interfering with manufacturers’ carefully considered production and logistics plans. And let’s not forget wildly fluctuating customer demand, driven by inflation and other factors beyond manufacturers’ control.
How can car and truck makers, and other production-centered businesses, achieve predictable results under these uncertain conditions? Blue Yonder’s new white paper — “A Guide to Transforming Your Manufacturing Processes” — includes some powerful recommendations. In short, manufacturers need to reimagine their foundational processes to create additional resilience, then match those new processes with innovative digital technologies and new network structures. They need to counter today’s changing world by transforming their supply chains, led by manufacturing process improvements and digitalization.
What exactly does that mean — and is it achievable for the typical manufacturer? Let’s take a closer look at one of the most critical capabilities for any production-centered business: Advanced planning and scheduling, or APS.
In the complex, capital-intensive world of large-scale manufacturing, APS is both challenging and indispensable. APS involves scheduling orders in assembly lines and aligning them with material availability, while considering restrictions, production rules and delivery dates. APS must be unfailingly accurate to maximize customer service and minimize costs, but it must also be agile and able to adapt to changing conditions.
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Mastering the complexity of APS with advanced technology
APS involves extremely complex scenario planning that considers countless influencing factors — from materials availability to fluctuating demand — as well as millions of possible outcomes. Daily re-planning is essential, and real-time decisions revolve around critical factors such as build and delivery dates, detailed product mixes, production capacities and volumes, and order and job sequencing.
Along the way, the APS journey includes key tasks such as slotting, sequencing and detailed scheduling. Slotting considers delivery dates when scheduling orders into production, with its rules and constraints, while sequencing optimizes production sequences based on all existing orders. Detailed scheduling optimizes production programs, while creating transparency into demand, resources and capacities. Schedulers are tasked with understanding production processes, modeling supply chain constraints, and balancing various corporate objectives such as cost, service and sustainability.
There’s no doubt that modern APS is incredibly complex. Large-scale manufacturing has evolved into an extremely time-sensitive, resource-intensive and costly activity that plays a central role in fulfilling customer promises and expectations. But fortunately, just as manufacturing has evolved, so have advanced technology solutions designed to optimize the production process.
Today’s best-in-class APS solutions optimize scheduling to drive manufacturers’ crucial decisions, including when to build orders, which production lines to utilize, and the detailed job sequence for production. These solutions are tailored for shop floor oriented, large-scale manufacturing processes such as vehicle production. The choice of an APS solution for scheduling is strategic, impacting operations planning, enterprise resource planning (ERP), downstream supplier schedules, quality control and manufacturing execution systems (MES).
Blue Yonder Production Planning includes APS capabilities that are available as composable solutions. They strategically integrate ERP, MES, material requirements planning (MRP), and sales and operations planning (S&OP) to achieve various goals across different aspects of the manufacturing process.
Blue Yonder’s optimization engines, which exceed human cognition, ingest a wide range of internal and external data, to arrive at strategic, adaptable production plans that deliver the best result for the end-to-end supply chain. Intelligent Blue Yonder APS solutions enable highly detailed scenario planning, as well as the ability to replan dynamically as conditions inevitably change.
Automakers can orchestrate all their supply chain processes, including demand and supply planning, directly with production planning by launching multiple solutions on Blue Yonder Platform. By combining advanced Blue Yonder AI with Platform, manufacturers can generate and share insights, optimize workflows and automate planning across functional siloes.
Maximizing the strategic contribution of APS
Production scheduling is not just a daily operational task, it’s a strategically important function that directly impacts the quality and speed of manufacturing output, the return on capital investments, and ultimate cost and service outcomes. Scheduling plays a central role in the IT architecture, supporting seamless integration and efficiency across the end-to-end supply chain. Aligning production scheduling with broader company strategies ensures coherence and effectiveness in achieving overarching goals such as optimizing service, cost and sustainability.
As more manufacturing teams recognize the critical importance of advanced production scheduling, their deployment strategies for APS solutions are evolving. More companies are shifting their hosting model to the cloud, to gain speed and performance advantages, as well as leveraging APS solutions as add-ons to their ERP systems. Blue Yonder Production Planning delivers modular APS software for cloud deployment and offers software-as-a-service (SaaS) to allow for fast launches, cost-effective maintenance, minimal downtime and seamless upgrades.
Blue Yonder APS also supports product personalization, which is in high demand from customers. It provides an increased ability to custom-tailor products before they’re built, as well as visibility into how different product configurations will affect fulfillment dates. Blue Yonder software also considers the impacts of any parts shortages on fulfillment promises. Combined with Blue Yonder’s integrated planning, execution and commerce solutions, Blue Yonder APS supports an unprecedented ability for companies to deliver highly configurable products to customers.
Companies are capitalizing on the advanced capabilities of Blue Yonder Production Planning to extend their production schedules further into the future and consider longer-term planning horizons with a high level of granularity. No-touch APS transactions, where orders are placed autonomously with minimal human intervention, are another key capability of Blue Yonder. This involves integrating both human and machine workflows, with planners still playing a crucial role in optimizing schedules.
It’s time to implement leading-edge APS technology
The increasing frequency of disruptions, as well as the growing momentum of digital supply chain transformation, is driving car and truck makers, as well as other large-scale manufacturers, to seek technology-enabled APS solutions.
Modern APS software can assume the role of a translator, turning key business metrics like cost and sustainability into practical daily operations plans. The integration of high-level business requirements and technology enables manufacturers to identify trends and patterns, and automatically optimize their production schedules in response. APS software also helps production-centered businesses remain profitable and competitive, by enabling them to continuously adapt to disruptions and evolving customer requirements in a strategic manner.
How can you get started on your APS journey? Blue Yonder makes it easy, by delivering the most advanced intelligence via a modular, cloud-native approach. Blue Yonder’s composable solutions, including Blue Yonder APS, can be added on top of the existing technology stack for a rapid launch and an early return on investment. Connected on Blue Yonder Platform and sharing the same data, Production Planning and other Blue Yonder solutions facilitate real-time, cross-functional business collaboration. This integration supports more agile decision-making, elevates customer satisfaction, drives profitable growth, and fosters the development of resilient, sustainable supply chains.
Your path to efficient manufacturing starts here
Explore the possibilities of process transformation for your large-scale manufacturing with Blue Yonder Production Planning and APS.
