Companies must apply efficient industrial operations planning processes that incorporate constraints and guarantee the availability of equipment, resources, materials and components if they are to optimize the use of their production capacity, reduce their manufacturing costs and improve product availability rates.

In addition to questions of product segmentation, production constraint modeling and the associated information systems, the implementation or overhaul of the production planning processes must address the question of roles and responsibilities between the supply chain and production in the control of capacities and production flows across different timescales.

If manufacturing is responsible for planning, then how can the quality of the supply chain KPIs - stocks, product availability and logistics costs - be guaranteed? And if, on the contrary, the supply chain proposes the weekly production plan, then how can production be correctly optimized? In more general terms, what is the substance of the contract that binds manufacturing to the supply chain?

The answer to this question depends on the company’s supply chain model, the corporate culture and the business context in which the company operates (cost, cash and service priorities). Our experience has demonstrated the existence of supply chain models that are organized mainly according to the complexity of the supply (the industrial complexity) and the demand, and that the most efficient companies are those that succeed in defining a governance system that is coherent with these models.

Other questions must be answered subsequently:

• How to differentiate the control methods according to product segment (make to order vs. make to stock, fast movers vs. slow movers, products in decline vs. new products, etc.) in order to best reconcile the contradictory challenges facing sales and manufacturing?
• How to adapt the belt tension between sales and production to the different product types?
• Which product link can be used in the master production schedule (MPS) to adapt workload to capacity? With which unit of time?
• How can the MPS be used to take structural decisions (assignment of new products, opening and closing of production lines, etc.)?
• How can the multi-site MPS be integrated with the immediate environment (site scheduling, operational relations with subcontractors, etc.)?
• etc. 

Argon Consulting helps its customers in:

• the identification of the challenges related to existing malfunctions and the estimate of the cost of overhauling the organizations and tools (business case),
• the clarification of the target organization in terms of skills and size, organization (central vs. local, planning vs. scheduling) and roles and responsibilities that are coherent with the company’s supply chain model,
• the overhaul of processes in line with best practices and the specifics of the company (products, constraints, production network, etc.), while clarifying the switch from a medium-term / aggregated mesh (planning) to short-term / SKU mesh (scheduling),
• the modeling of bottlenecks and the selection of constrained planning methods,
• the review of key parameters (operational procedures and cycles, machine capacity and efficiency, minimum supplier orders, etc.),
• the definition and assessment of alternative scenarios in the event of problems of capacity or availability of materials (make or buy, balance between sites, additional resources, arbitration and management of priorities, etc.),
• the implementation of alerts, KPIs and scorecards,
• the selection and implementation of operational planning tools – MPS, scheduling (authoring of the specifications, management of calls for tender, deployment strategy, implementation assistance, project management and risk management, etc.),
• deploying a plan for improvement (training, fine-tuning of models, etc.) and change management (changes in culture, behavior, skills and communication).