IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps

Benefits of IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps

Unlike any other supply chain application, IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps for factory production planning and detailed scheduling provides unique powerful features for Process and Hybrid Industry (CPG, Food & Beverage, Pharma, Chemicals ) and in particular for Fresh Products in Food Industry.

Features of IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps

• Planning and Scheduling are both based on Advanced Optimization Engines: The users define constraints and goals, and IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps, after examining an extremely huge number of possibilities in a quick and particularly smart way, provides a feasible and optimized solution in short amount of time.
• An advanced decision support system for Factory planners and Area schedulers: Users can easily interact with a generated production plan, by modifying it, by imposing new constraints, by relaxing some existing ones or by setting new optimization strategies. Its easy to create What IF simulation scenarios and compare them.
• A precise production model for Process and Hybrid Industries and in particular for Fresh Products in the Food Industry: IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps provides powerful features designed for Process and Hybrid Industry (CPG, Food & Beverage, Pharma, Chemicals ) and in particular for Fresh Products in Food Industry.
• Integrated Planning and Scheduling in one single model of the Factory: The user doesnt need to define two different models, one aggregated, for the Planning and one, detailed, for the Scheduling. In this way, the user has to maintain just a single model and the congruence between Planning and Scheduling is guarantee.
• Highly customizable: IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps has been designed to provide a robust and advanced framework to develop verticals based on the standard product.

Key features:

• Easy-to-use and interactive planning with what-if analysis
• Advanced optimization of financial and operational KPIs
• Specific advanced functionalities for process and hybrid industry
• Integrated Planning and Scheduling
• Highly customizable
• Advanced integrations with SAP R/3 and SAP APO and other ERP systems

The power of IBM Optimization technology

IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps gives planners the power of IBM's optimization technology, embedded in a decision support application designed for the process and hybrid industry.

IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps planning and scheduling engines can be driven by financial and operational goals:

• Maximize: Revenue, Customer service level
• Minimize: Loss due to product unavailability for sales, Production resource usage costs, Waste, Inventory cost, Cost for cleaning and changeovers
• Guarantee: Item specific max and min stock levels

Extended what-if analysis capabilities

IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps provides an easy-to-use "what-if" analysis module that enables planners, operations managers and industrial engineers to simulate production scenarios and compare schedules with KPIs and graphical displays. By simulating alternatives and comparing them through key metrics, manufacturers can make better decisions. Plant- or business-specific key performance inidcators (KPIs) can be easily integrated into IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps, providing the exact metrics required by plant executives.

With extended functionality for what-if analysis, reporting and master data editing, IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps is the perfect tool for designing plants and processes. Industrial engineers and production planners can now collaborate on making decisions affecting plant profitability. Engineers can validate their models by generating realistic schedules using manufacturing data, supply and demand constraints, and the same sophisticated optimization technology used by their colleagues in the manufacturing industry.

Precise production model for Process and Hybrid Industry and in particular for Fresh Products in Food Industry

IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps captures true manufacturing constraints and the challenges that planners and schedulers face in the batch process industry. Plant PowerOps' detailed models helps them to generate truly feasible production schedules that can be actually dispatched and executed. Features managed by IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps include:

• Advanced safety stock optimization
• Optimized automatic selection of alternative recipes with batch constraints
• Linear blending optimization
• Optimized batch size calculation taking into account production constraints (e.g., equipment capacity)
• Batching policies for traceability
• Shelf life and maturation time for raw material, semi finished and finished products
• Customer required remaining shelf life
• Waste management
• Resource connections (pipelines, conveyors, )
• Variable machine efficiency
• Finite capacity warehouses, tanks, buffers and silos
• Cleaning-In-Place (CIP) optimization and cleaning procedures
• Co-products and by-products

Integrated production planning and detailed scheduling

Often, when working with other Planning and Scheduling systems, the solutions found by Planning diverge from the solutions found by Scheduling. For example, when Planning provides input to Scheduling, an input to Scheduling may generate poor or infeasible results. This is due to the fact that the two modules are decoupled and they work on different assumptions and Factory models.

In IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps the user defines and maintains just one model of the Factory, a detailed model that is required for detailed scheduling. No integration and data transfer between the planning and the scheduling engine is necessary since the planning engine will create in memory its own model based on the detailed model of the Factory. Moreover, in finding the final solution, the two engines collaborate within a hierarchical planning and scheduling framework. In this way, Plant PowerOps remove the gaps between planning and scheduling.

Highly customizable:

Plant PowerOps has been designed to provide a robust and advanced framework to develop verticals based on the standard product. Business Partners and System Integrators having the knowledge of a particular industry sector can develop their vertical. Customization can be made by using XLM and JAVA API. Among the most common Plant PowerOps customization we find:

• Java plug-ins
• Customization of views, menus and toolbars
• Custom tables and custom fields
• Custom KPIs
• Custom checking rules (solution checking and data checking)
• Planning and scheduling strategies (decompositions)
• Custom views
• Extensions with new optimization engines

Key benefits:

• Find the best balance between order fulfillment and operational efficiency
• Guarantee that production plans are feasible given tank capacities, cleaning rules, product flows, etc
• Minimize inventory surpluses and stock-outs
• Change planning decisions (such as production quantities) and scheduling decisions (such as resource assignments) within the same application session
• Improve cooperation between planners and schedulers
• Inventory optimization for manufacturing: IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps is the first tool on the market that can set safety stock targets and generate production plansall within one global optimization model that takes into account demand variability. Before the introduction of ILOG PPO, safety stock targets were set using guesswork, formulas or algorithms based on average production lead times. Planners would then build production plans that were sometimes far off the assumed average lead time, invalidating targets. This kind of mistake leads to maintaining the wrong inventory at the wrong time, producing lower service levels and higher inventory levels than necessary. IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps' new global optimization feature makes certain that the safety stock perfectly covers production and demand variability, leading to improved service levels and reduced inventories.
• Easy implementation with SAP R/3 and SAP's Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO): Decouple state-of-the-art analytics from your transaction architecture. IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps is non-disruptive; it plugs into and complements your enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), and manufacturing execution system (MES) applications. Now you can standardize on state-of-the-art planning and scheduling software that goes beyond traditional advanced planning solutions, and decouple your pursuit of state-of-the-art analytics from your transaction management application roadmap. IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps has a predefined connector for SAP R/3 and SAP APO. It can be integrated with most leading ERP and SCM systems.
• Customization features: IBM ILOG Plant PowerOps can be tailored to incorporate your data elements and metrics while the core optimization and scenario comparison functions remain untouched. Add company-specific data elements to the database schema, plant-specific KPIs, custom data validation and alarm rules, custom solution display screens and even specific solving strategies.

 

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