- Facilitates production decisions in the event of supply bottlenecks
- Triage tool for preparing the decision as to which customer order will be produced and which will not
Herzogenrath (near Aachen), July 26, 2022 – With the Critical Part Information System (CPIS for short), SCT GmbH is introducing a new data analytics function for the DISKOVER MRP management system. It supports companies in making faster and better business-critical decisions on material procurement and production in the current frequent supply bottlenecks. It facilitates decision-making both in the event of procurement bottlenecks due to increasingly volatile supply chains and when there is a lack of capacity to manufacture certain parts. The aim is to use the available material as profitably as possible for the company in the event of bottlenecks. To achieve this, it must be possible to quickly and easily identify the most important items and their essential requirement quantities.
“The core problem with the procurement of components is that pure customer requirements can no longer be identified at the lower BOM levels of daily scheduling. They are obscured by a number of factors that are intended to ensure cost-effective logistics processing and a high level of delivery readiness in normal operations. CPIS removes this fog,” explains Andreas Capellmann, Managing Director of SCT GmbH.
The problem: MRP management systems such as DISKOVER bundle customer requirements, forecast planned requirements and safety stock replenishments into larger planned orders at all BOM levels, then sometimes fill them up to minimum lot sizes and round them to multiples of a practical logistics lot size – such as a carton or a pallet. The dependent requirements that end up with the items on the lower BOM levels in this way therefore only supply a certain proportion of genuine, existing customer orders. “However, it is important to know exactly what these are in the event of a lack of resources in order to decide which customer order should be produced and which should not,” explains Capellmann.
The CPIS system provides a crystal-clear view of all real customer orders that are affected by supply bottlenecks for critical components and their direct and indirect uses. For this purpose, CPIS carries out a material requirements planning run (MPR run for short) solely for the customer orders linked to these critical components and determines all the necessary requirements under the changed boundary conditions. Safety stocks and lot size restrictions can therefore be optionally switched off so that the pure market requirements for the components are visible without having to take into account quantities for safety stock replenishment and without having to consider additional quantities to meet minimum lot sizes.
CPIS is a new function of the Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS) system DISKOVER SCO, which is currently experiencing a sharp rise in demand due to the increased need for faster and better scheduling decisions, as companies currently want to secure their sometimes extremely unstable supply chains more reliably. CPIS is another tool for decision-making in critical planning situations. These tools also include the Service Level Optimizer, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to support the correct design of safety stocks and thus ensure high delivery readiness at low cost. The CPIS tool now also opens up a view of critical parts and their use in order to ultimately produce the orders that are most important to companies.
The APS tool is characterized by extensive simulation mechanisms that run automatically in the background and continuously optimize planning and scheduling settings and decisions. In this way, even less technically and professionally experienced users benefit from a high level of forecasting accuracy and scheduling precision, and companies benefit from high delivery readiness without wasting material. DISKOVER SCO is a flexible tool that is easy to use and therefore efficient and rational, and is always up to date thanks to its innovative continuous delivery and full-service concept. Data is exchanged with leading ERP systems via standardized interfaces.
