Service Center: Planning and Scheduling for Operational Excellence

The Service Center Challenge

Service centers walk a fine line between profit and loss. They must balance production efficiency with responsiveness and acceptable customer service levels while competing in a price sensitive and crowded marketplace. The complex production planning process involved in operating one or more service centers entails managing numerous critical factors, such as:

• Minimizing inventory and delivery time while offering sufficient variety in product dimensions and characteristics
• Minimizing transportation costs
• Complexity in production planning: managing complex sequencing, trimming and routing of orders
• Correctly predicting due dates

Revealing Synergies

Consolidating service centers can create positive synergies. Accepting orders based on the production capacities of multiple service centers and the ability to assign orders efficiently across them can positively impact bottom line results. Quintiq empowers you to make the most of your entire network’s capabilities by optimizing the complex production planning process across service centers, including accounting for all relevant production and transportation constraints. 

Quintiq/SAP Resource Planning and Optimization for Metal Service Centers

 
SAP and Quintiq have created a composite resource planning and scheduling solution that specifically meets the needs of metal service center planners. SAP and Quintiq combined the SAP business software with the Quintiq multi-resource planning application on the basis of the SAP NetWeaver® Platform. The “Powered by SAP NetWeaver® certification guarantees Quintiq and SAP customers a seamless integration of both technologies, protecting existing IT investments. SAP NetWeaver® provides a comprehensive, open and flexible infrastructure that makes it simple to integrate SAP and non-SAP applications. The integration and application platform aligns IT with business objectives and lowers the total cost of ownership (TOC) of customer IT infrastructures.

This scalable composite solution enables true collaborative processes that integrate:

• Mid-term Tactical Planning – E.g., order acceptance based on both material and capacity availability.
• Short-term Detailed Scheduling – E.g., automatic scheduling of tasks and resources; automatic real-time event management; solving disturbances such as, machine breakdowns, illness or last-minute customer orders. 

The joint solution Quintiq Resource Planning and Optimization for SAP addresses the following:

Master Data

All relevant master data are maintained only once in the SAP ERP system; then shared with SAP SCM and Quintiq. The solution covers: 

• Material master data
• Work centers
• Routings

Tactical Planning

The solution uses traditional SAP order entry. These order data are input to the SCM-APO system, where capacity checking takes place, based on customer required due dates. 

Operational Planning

The tactical planning level gives you a precise picture of which orders should be produced in the next days. This is the input for operational planning. The support the system offers, involves:

• Determination of optimal order combination for each coil (automated), taking yield percentages into account.
• Determination of required knife setting.
• Scrap handling, offering the possibility to put unused material back into stock.
• Routing creation: Each order on a coil has a (different) routing; orders are kept together as long as possible.
• Optimized detailed scheduling of individual operations, including slitting, cutting and finishing operations.
• Communication of schedule to shopfloor. 

Execution

Our joint solution offers extensive possibilities to get feedback from the shopfloor and use this information to update the detailed planning: 

• Register machine breakdowns and/or unplanned maintenance.
• Receive feedback on actual order start times and end times and updating the planning if these data differ from planning data.
• Receive feedback on actual production quantities and scrap data.

View our Planning Software Solutions