Detailed scheduling
Efficiently plan and control production orders and resources with digital detailed planning
Many companies are facing increasing competitive and cost pressure. Conserving resources, increasing efficiency, ensuring quality and delivering on time are important issues in production in order to maintain competitiveness. Topics that fall under the remit of planning – specifically detailed planning.
“Good planning is based on data, not opinions” is a well-known quote from statistics. It emphasizes the particular importance of data-based planning in the production process. This is because production can be optimally planned and controlled with the help of digitally recorded data.
Software tools such as digital detailed planning, for example the MES app “FE Detailed Scheduling” from FORCAM ENISCO or the planning component “SAP REO” (Resource Orchestration) of the SAP Digital Manufacturing solution, ensure this.
What is detailed scheduling?
Detailed scheduling – also known as detailed production planning – is an essential process of production management and deals with the short-term planning and control of production processes. In contrast to rough-cut planning, which deals with longer-term goals and strategic decisions, detailed planning focuses on the day-to-day and detailed planning and organization of production. The aim of detailed planning is to make optimum use of the resources available for each order, such as machines, materials and personnel, in order to ensure timely and efficient production.
What are the tasks of detailed planning?
Detailed planning comprises a variety of tasks that are closely interlinked. These include
1) Ressource planning:
- Machine allocation: Detailed planning of machine allocation, taking into account set-up times, maintenance intervals and capacity limits.
- Personnel deployment planning: Assignment of employees to the individual operations, taking into account qualifications, availability and working time models.
- Material planning: Ensuring material availability for the planned production orders at the right time and in the right quantity.
2) Process planning:
- Sequence planning: determining the optimal sequence of production orders on the individual machines and systems in order to minimize throughput times and avoid idle times.
- Batch size planning: Determining the optimum batch size for the individual production orders, taking set-up costs, storage costs and capacity utilization into account.
- Scheduling: Determination of start and end dates for the individual production orders and work processes, taking into account throughput times, delivery dates and resource availability.
3) Production control:
- Use of order data from the ERP: essential to obtain detailed information about the orders to be produced with target dates and priorities.
- Order release: Release of planned production orders for execution in production.
- Progress control: Monitoring of production progress and identification of deviations from the plan.
- Intervention control: Taking corrective measures in the event of deviations from the plan, e.g. adjusting the sequence planning or prioritizing urgent orders.
What are the benefits of effective detailed scheduling?
From improved collaboration and communication to increased profitability and customer satisfaction, detailed planning offers numerous benefits that help companies achieve their strategic goals and compete in a dynamic market environment. Significant benefits include:
- Shorter lead times: Minimizing lead times by avoiding idle time and optimized sequencing lead to faster completion of products.
- Lower stock levels: By planning materials in line with demand and avoiding overproduction, stock levels are reduced, and storage costs are lowered.
- Higher capacity utilization: Optimum utilization of production resources leads to higher productivity and profitability.
- On-time delivery: Optimum planning and control of production processes ensures that delivery deadlines are met.
- Increased customer loyalty: Reliable adherence to delivery deadlines strengthens customer loyalty and improves the company’s competitiveness.
What are the challenges of detailed planning?
Detailed planning is a complex process that is associated with numerous challenges. Unexpected problems can often arise that require improvisation in planning – e.g. a supplier cancels, an important employee falls ill or an unforeseen cost item arises. Without the necessary transparency and control, it is therefore almost impossible to create up-to-date production plans.
This makes it all the more important to have flexible detailed planning with appropriate digital tools that allow you to run through different scenarios so that you always have a “plan B” at the ready.
The biggest challenges in detailed planning:
- Dynamic environment: short-term changes to customer requirements, material bottlenecks or machine breakdowns require planning to be highly flexible and adaptable.
- Data quality: The quality of planning depends largely on the quality of the underlying data. Inaccurate or incomplete data can lead to planning errors and inefficiencies.
- Complexity: The increasing number of variants, the shortening of product life cycles and the globalization of supply chains increase the overall complexity of production – and therefore also of detailed planning.
Not forgetting the human factor: detailed planning is not just a technical task, but also requires the involvement of employees through continuous exchange and open communication of mutual experience.
What are the methods and tools of detailed planning?
Various methods and tools are available to manage the diverse tasks of detailed planning. These include:
- Gantt charts: Graphical representation of production orders and their schedules.
- Network planning technique: Representation of complex projects with dependencies between the individual operations.
- Priority rules: Definition of rules for sequence planning, e.g. “shortest operation time” or “earliest completion date”.
- Simulation: Simulation of the production system on digital end devices (tablets etc.) to test different planning scenarios and find the optimum solution.
- Software solutions: ERP systems (Enterprise Resource Planning) with integrated modules for detailed planning (e.g. FE Detailed Scheduling or SAP REO).
To cope with the complexity of detailed planning, different systems offer a variety of functions that support detailed planning, e.g.:
- Graphical planning boards: for visualizing the production plan and for interactive planning of production orders.
- Automatic sequence planning: Algorithms that determine the optimum sequence of production orders, taking various criteria into account.
- Material requirements planning: Functions for calculating material requirements and monitoring material availability.
- Capacity planning: Functions for calculating the utilization of machines and personnel to identify bottlenecks.
How does detailed planning work with digital planning tools FE Detailed Scheduling from FORCAM ENISCO or SAP REO?
In order to fulfill the tasks efficiently, continuous integration of machines, MES and ERP systems are required. Machine data acquisition (MDA) and production data acquisition (PDA) provide the necessary real-time information from production.
With detailed planning tools such as FE Detailed Scheduling from FORCAM ENISCO or SAP REO, you have real-time transparency: production management can view the plan at any time, keep an eye on the production status with all available resources and immediately identify potential bottlenecks and short-term disruptions.
The FE Detailed Scheduling app from FORCAM ENISCO
The MES app is a versatile tool for digital detailed scheduling in production. It enables automated and dynamic detailed planning, taking all relevant resources into account.
FE Detailed Scheduling from FORCAM ENISCO enables efficient and flexible detailed planning in production, which leads to improved resource utilization, reduced planning effort and increased adherence to schedules.
