Marking its 14th edition this year, Optilon Supply Chain Conference registered a large and interested audience of Scandinavian managers and academics, who shared two intense days of workshops, seminars and round tables dedicated to the theme of innovation in the field of Supply Chain, paying particular attention to the impact deriving from the application of new technologies, first of all Artificial Intelligence.
Plannet CEO, Vincenzo Bo, was among the invited speakers of the Supply Chain Academy and its speech focused on the definition of the cost-optimized production plan, a particularly challenging topic above all in complex Supply Chain environments, where production and markets are deeply interconnected.
The major goal of Plannet Plan Cost Optimiser software is to support planners to govern the finite capacity plan in multi-plant environments as well as to enhance informed decision making for production allocation in plants with alternative production lines.
Remarkable features of the PCO software are its extraordinary speed, its easy-to-design supply chain model and full integration of the tool within the planning & scheduling process.
The innovative in-memory engine makes PCO an effective and fast-responsive tool, capable to actively simulate and react to business changes in demand pattern, resource availability profile and production cost drivers.
To calculate the optimized plan, PCO algorithm takes into consideration a wide range of cost drivers: production capacity, sourcing, stock, product-mix, transfer, lost sales and service level. On the other hand, the main production constraints to configure are production capacity, efficiency, skilled labor availability, critical materials and, when appropriate, minimum lot size.
Each simulation delivers, in a few minutes, a comprehensive optimised scenario releasing the production capacity profile at resource level, the production volume of each item/resource, the cost of the plan and an easy to configure set of KPIs.
PCO can be used as a stand-alone tool but one of its key benefits is its end-to-end integration to COMPASS10 suite: the short-term frozen schedule of each plant/line is a constraining input to PCO simulations and, consistently, each PCO optimized scenario determines the mid- to long-term production plan and capacity profile, which the scheduling process refines applying sequencing criteria and optimization rules to deliver the optimized short-term schedule.
