The client’s sales offices are located across the globe. They also have manufacturing plants in the US, Europe, Japan and Singapore. The sales offices sent purchase orders from OEM and retail customers to the client headquarters in the US. OEM customers contribute 65% of the entire orders.

The client’s external environment was characterized by fluctuating demand and volatile pricing. The client has short-term contracts (15 days) with OEMs and spot pricing for non-OEM clients.

Internally the client had to deal with high capital-intensive operations since depreciation is about $1 million/day. The client had a broad product mix (12000 + products) with high manufacturing lead times and varying production yields. Product life cycles were shortened due to increased obsolescence. It was very essential to have a system that dynamically incorporated changes in the external and internal environments in production planning to help optimize resource utilization and improve shop floor efficiencies while managing customer demand.

Wipro designed and implemented a comprehensive Global Planning and Scheduling system (GPS). The application was developed in a 3-tier architecture in client/server environment. Once the problem was defined, Wipro identified business processes and information required to develop a solution. Based on these requirements Wipro evolved a solution which not only changed existing business processes but also created systems to provide the information required for the solution.

	Data integration for an integrated view of demand, capacity and supply across sites
	Global planner to determine product mix and volume for test facilities worldwide
	Factory planner to execute global plan for each facility and create a facility production plan
	Dispatcher and plan manager to monitor the production line by comparing actual vs. planned production and send adjustments as conditions change on the plant floor

	Integrates 15 disparate legacy systems across different geographies
	Facilitates line balancing for each manufacturing plant
	Ensures optimum usage of resources across three manufacturing plants
	Allows for dynamic plan adjustments at each manufacturing location and creating a “pull” system across the operations
	Runs the global plan for every shift and the scheduler every 2 hours
	High data volume. Deals with 14000 products and hundreds of equipments
	Demand Supply details run into millions of transactions
	Information systems aligned to cater to GPS needs