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ILOG Aims to Take Planners to New Level for Managing Demand Variability
Plant PowerOps 3.0 targets complex manufacturing environments in the process industries and fast-moving consumer goods with tools to generate feasible, optimal plans
Sunnyvale, CA — February 5, 2008 — Software company ILOG has taken the wraps off the latest version of its Plant PowerOps planning and scheduling solution, offering tools aimed at increasing production planners' ability to generate feasible and optimal plans and better control demand and manufacturing variability through such features as a material rebalancing engine and improved rescheduling capabilities.
Version 3.0 of Plant PowerOps (PPO) also features multidimensional product- and time-aggregation capabilities intended to enable planners to better analyze and manage complex manufacturing environments that require the consideration of multiple product characteristics. PPO is now part of the ILOG LogicTools Supply Chain Applications Suite.
Filling a Gap
ILOG's Filippo Focacci, product manager for PPO, said that the software company developed Plant PowerOps to fill a market gap in advanced planning solutions for companies in the food and beverage, fast-moving consumer goods, pharmaceutical and chemical industries.
Today's competitive business dynamics are forcing many manufacturing companies to increase flexibility, accept smaller order sizes and introduce new products at faster rates than ever before, even as they improve production efficiency and service levels.
Yet, as ILOG sees it, most advanced planning and scheduling (APS) software packages on the market — whether part of enterprise resource planning (ERP) or supply chain management (SCM) systems or standalone — can only manage simple production processes. The limitations in their ability to address key manufacturing constraints generate unrealistic schedules, high manufacturing costs and poor inventory coverage and service levels, ILOG contends.
In these verticals, Focacci said, planners must be able to model key physical constraints such as tanks, cleaning policies and sequence dependent changeovers for both intermediate and finished products, and they need the ability to map current planning and scheduling processes. In addition, planners in these industries require the ability to model what-if scenarios, and to take into supply chain considerations that could include planning and scheduling changes.
"Planners need an application that, on the one hand, enables them to run different scenarios and what-if analyses, and, on the other hand, to interact with the system so they can modify a solution and check the feasibility of a new solution," Focacci said. "The optimization engine generates a very good starting point for the planner, and then it is the planner's responsibility to generate the final plan."
Version 3.0 of Plant PowerOps (PPO) also features multidimensional product- and time-aggregation capabilities intended to enable planners to better analyze and manage complex manufacturing environments that require the consideration of multiple product characteristics. PPO is now part of the ILOG LogicTools Supply Chain Applications Suite.
Filling a Gap
ILOG's Filippo Focacci, product manager for PPO, said that the software company developed Plant PowerOps to fill a market gap in advanced planning solutions for companies in the food and beverage, fast-moving consumer goods, pharmaceutical and chemical industries.
Today's competitive business dynamics are forcing many manufacturing companies to increase flexibility, accept smaller order sizes and introduce new products at faster rates than ever before, even as they improve production efficiency and service levels.
Yet, as ILOG sees it, most advanced planning and scheduling (APS) software packages on the market — whether part of enterprise resource planning (ERP) or supply chain management (SCM) systems or standalone — can only manage simple production processes. The limitations in their ability to address key manufacturing constraints generate unrealistic schedules, high manufacturing costs and poor inventory coverage and service levels, ILOG contends.
In these verticals, Focacci said, planners must be able to model key physical constraints such as tanks, cleaning policies and sequence dependent changeovers for both intermediate and finished products, and they need the ability to map current planning and scheduling processes. In addition, planners in these industries require the ability to model what-if scenarios, and to take into supply chain considerations that could include planning and scheduling changes.
"Planners need an application that, on the one hand, enables them to run different scenarios and what-if analyses, and, on the other hand, to interact with the system so they can modify a solution and check the feasibility of a new solution," Focacci said. "The optimization engine generates a very good starting point for the planner, and then it is the planner's responsibility to generate the final plan."
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