Optimizing the Nerve Center of Manufacturing Operations with Intelligent Planning & Scheduling

The manufacturing industry is at the cusp of pervasive and disruptive change, driven by Industry 4.0, smart supply chains, and flexible manufacturing. The goal is to achieve faster time-to-market, with faster product rollouts, extreme product customization, and an enhanced customer experience.

We consider Intelligent Planning & Scheduling as a core business process and the central nervous system of manufacturing operations that drives both operational and business performance. Infosys offers an end to end Intelligent Planning & Scheduling service offering, which addresses this important need and is uniquely positioned to drive performance and innovation.

A ‘must have’ for the next wave of smart manufacturing, our offering includes the following competencies:

  • The ability to merge Smart Factory and Industry 4.0 trends with rapid deployment and higher ROI
  • Robust, scalable, and proven capabilities across various segments of the manufacturing industry
  • Wide global reach as well as specialized and advanced expertise across business, functional, and technical function

Built on top of the best-in-class industry software DELMIA Ortems, the solution combines the software’s strengths with our proven methodology and deployment experience to create solutions that help manufacturers optimize plant performance in a dynamic, responsive, and collaborative environment. This robust solution set drives process synchronization to improve productivity and production changeover in order to meet customer expectations, in addition to compressing lead time to reduce working capital, work in process (WIP), and finished goods inventory.

 

The approach to solution development and deployment has to be based on the promise of delivering rapid ROI and quantifiable performance optimization. We at Infosys, in partnership with Dassault Systèmes, have refined a methodology and approach which is business driven. We focus/organize our deployment around well-defined benefit targets, and offer best-in-class practices and expertise, including:

  • Thought leadership to optimize the customer value
  • Strong industry and domain knowledge to bind quickly into the customer context.
  • Value-based and business problem-solving approach — we solve problems rather than implementing functions
  • Accelerated deployment methodology to ensure rapid ROI and
  • Scalable capabilities for multi-site deployment to ensure end to end consistent and rapid transformation across a company’s manufacturing plants and supply chain.

Our Success Story  

A heavy equipment manufacturer was struggling with low forecast accuracy and an unclear inventory policy. This was affecting the master production schedule which was manual and did not give enough visibility to the future. In addition, beyond the MPS, there was no formal schedule to synchronize with the manufacturing back shops. As a result, the bottleneck resource was not known leading to sub optimized plan and loss of overall throughput.

Infosys leveraged Ortems to implement a solution with three synchronized levels of planning and scheduling over a 4-month horizon. The new manufacturing process is now pulled by final assembly through a complex bill of materials (BOM). This helped achieve 15% throughput optimization, 30% lead time compression, and 95% time saving, along with superior manufacturing process synchronization.

Editor’s Note: To hear from Infosys and other industry leaders on the value of Intelligent Planning & Scheduling solutions register for Dassault Sytemes 3DEXPERIENCE FORUM 2019, taking place May 13-16 at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas.

Dr. Yasser Alkazzaz
Yasser Alkazzaz is Global Practice Director, Manufacturing Planning & Scheduling for Infosys. He has 34 years of experience optimizing supply chain and manufacturing operations in a variety of industries including discrete and process manufacturing, heavy equipment (ETO, MTO & MTS), A&D, CPG, pharma, high tech, metal, and most recently, in plant engineering and construction projects. Yasser spent 10 years in supply chain software solution and consulting leading projects in strategy development, supply chain transformation, network design, planning and optimization, risk modeling, operations & performance management, and IT/process alignment. In addition, Yasser spent 10 years developing and leading projects in manufacturing operations, planning and scheduling optimizing throughput, lead time and improving operating expenses, on time delivery, and quality. In particular, Yasser developed and used different approaches and technologies of planning, scheduling and MES/IoT for manufacturing operations optimization, supervision, and shop floor controls using Delmia-ORTEMS -- a technology he developed during his PhD thesis and a company “ORTEMS” he co-founded in France in 1989