A decision support system for planners
Factory planners can easily interact with a generated plan by adding, removing, splitting or merging production orders. They can understand bottlenecks, move production from one line to another, and check the manually modified solution. ILOG Plant PowerOps's Gantt chart and solution views help planners safely fine-tune schedules based on human knowledge and experience.

Key features:

• Interactive planning book with stock coverage and stock event views
• Interactive scheduling and schedule repair
• Recipe, resource, batch size adjustment
• Solution checking, alerts and conflict explanations
• Scenario comparison
• Balance conflicting business goals
• Key performance indicator (KPI), stock summary and workload views
• Excel export

ILOG Plant PowerOps provides an easy-to-use "what-if" analysis module that enables planners and operations managers 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 KPIs can be easily integrated into ILOG Plant PowerOps, providing the exact metrics required by plant executives.

Analyze the impact of scheduling decisions. Enlarge image (opens a new window).

Integrated planning and detailed scheduling
With an integrated approach to planning and scheduling and precise modeling of all manufacturing activities and costs, ILOG Plant PowerOps improves the coordination between supply chain planning and manufacturing operations, improving on-time deliveries while reducing manufacturing costs. This is possible because the planning models use the same operational costs, constraints, business rules and goals as the model that produces the detailed schedules.

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 plant operations

Precise operational models
ILOG Plant PowerOps captures true manufacturing constraints by modeling multi-dimensional changeovers, cleaning and maintenance rules, convergent and divergent material flows, recipes with sequential tasks and precedence constraints, tanks, and shelf life. These detailed models enable the system to generate truly feasible plans with detailed schedules that can be actually used operationally.

Models effectively manage:

• Tanks
• Resource connections
• Cleaning activities with associated resource requirements
• Changeover time and cost
• Batching policies
• Intermediate products, co-products and by-products
• Shelf life and maturation time

A Gantt Chart shows the constraints that impact a schedule. Enlarge image (opens a new window).

Easy implementation
Decouple state-of-the-art analytics from your transaction architecture. 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, decoupling your pursuit of state-of-the-art analytics from your transaction management application roadmap. This approach is ideal for companies moving toward a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm.

Configurable features
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, and even custom solution display screens. The application's extensibility can even go beyond production planning and detailed scheduling to areas such as truck loading, in order to better synchronize production and transportation scheduling.

Interactive graphical user interface (GUI)
The ILOG Plant PowerOps user interface allows factory planners and supply chain managers to view and modify data and proposed production schedules through state-of-the-art displays, taking advantage of ILOG's award-winning visualization technology. Planners can easily analyze a given plan and discover bottlenecks, and multidimensional product and time aggregation enables them to analyze the results of planning based on several dimensions defined by product families. For example, it lets planners analyze stock coverage on products grouped by packaging or flavor.

The interface's components include:

• Demand, procurement and recipe view
• Inventory coverage view
• Interactive planning book
• Interactive Gantt chart
• Violation view with explanations
• Resource calendar
• Workload view
• KPI view
• Scenario creation
• Schedule comparison
• KPI comparison