Strategic Capacity Planning

The ORion-PI^® Business Planner supports strategic decision making as it addresses tactical as well as strategic tasks in capacity planning. It analyses and optimizes production processes with a mid to long-term planning horizon. Due to an integrated view and evaluation of all production processes the Business Planner accounts for all factors that take influence on the efficiency of your production process.
The most prominent are:

• Order structure
• Inventory situation
• campaign/batch/lot size
• production time and hence capacity of resources
• costs
• availability of materials
• production sequencing and consequently set-up relations
• delivery date
• availability of capacities (machines, transports, personnel, stock ground…)

Normally, the primary criterion to optimize strategic capacity planning are costs: from fixed to variable operating costs, from transport to stock-keeping costs, from capital lockup all the way to the overall costs of the supply chain. Next to that ORion-PI^® can draw on service aspects for evaluation, for example an optimal delivery service.

Optimization with the Business Planner is based on simulations, that is, optimal scenarios which consider the most diverse constraints and restrictions. Simulations allow the comparison and the evaluation of alternative business scenarios, visualizing how e.g. demands and resources can be strategically balanced to achieve an even use of the given capacities. Thereby, ORion-PI^® helps to identify the effects of changes in the production on the rest of the process steps.

The interactive Gantt-Chart adds to the gained transparency and usability. Its graphical user interface (GUI) allows the direct view and analysis as well as the comparison and manual change of orders and production processes.

The ORion-PI^® Business Planner supports strategic decision making, no matter if you are evaluating make-or-buy-decisions, changes in the product portfolio or more cost aspects. It allows you

• to identify bottlenecks or idle times
• to evaluate the sizing of the machinery,
• vessel optimization
• to evaluate emergency strategies
• to run investment analysis
• to optimize shift models
• to identify the optimal maintenance strategy
• to optimize lot sizes
• …