With the shift towards Industry 4.0, manufacturing companies are moving away from conventional processes towards a digitized model with an emphasis on smart factories with effective planning control systems. Conventional factory scheduling solutions were designed to deal with static situations within a factory manufacturing system. With the advent of digital and cloud technologies, it is now imperative to build agile and adaptive system solutions to handle modern-day manufacturing complexities.

 SAP and the Demand Driven Institute envisage an adaptive S&OP (Sales & Operations Planning) process for rapidly changing digital business environments, where adaptive scheduling is an essential ingredient. The objective of SAP IBP S&OP is to balance inventory, service levels, and profitability by arriving at a consensus across stakeholders of any planning ecosystem. A successful outcome of an IBP S&OP depends on how it is embraced smoothly from strategic to tactical and tactical to detailed planning and scheduling. Weekly/daily shop floor production plans are a subset of S&OP and further cascade to downstream processes such as shop floor scheduling.

There are challenges to realize a good plan into a feasible finite schedule considering various hard and soft constraints, which could be dynamic in nature. To cite a few examples: In the CPG industry, handling of dynamic bottlenecks in the production line is a complex task and depends on various set up transitions and number of different finished products. In the discrete industry, tooling is a critical resource constraint in automotive component production. Ignoring this during scheduling might impact production plans and thereby customer orders.

These critical constraints, which the scheduler encounters on a day-to-day basis, are not effectively handled by existing conventional tools. Wipro introduced a tool called Wipro’s Manufacturing Adaptive Scheduler, built on the SAP Cloud Platform which can be integrated with SAP S/4HANA or ECC versions, to handle these critical constraints and accelerate the ‘plan-to-produce’ cycle.

Wipro’s Manufacturing Adaptive Scheduler acts as a conduit between planning and execution to help customers realize their IBP’s S&OP plan into finite shop floor schedules by handling non-linear complex constraints. It provides accurate daily/sub-daily schedules, true bottleneck identification and the ability to handle dynamic bottlenecks resulting in flawless adoptability of a plan with more realistic shop floor schedules. Its accurate scheduling leads to complete capacity utilization of critical resources, 100% order fulfillment with more reliable order promise dates and lower TCO due to its lean implementation cycle and maintenance.