Planning
Planning is a key business process that ensures timely delivery to customers, maintains reasonable inventory levels and achieves high resource efficiency, enabling you to maximise the profitability of the business.
- The objective of long-term planning is to identify the expected costs and revenues of a project and verify the feasibility of the plan in terms of available resources
- Do you sell to customers where seasonal events and sales cause major fluctuations in demand for your products? QAD Demand Management helps you align marketing activities, generate sales forecasts and plan production and purchasing on time
- Do you need to respond to ever-changing customer demand dynamically? The QAD MRPII Planning Tool tracks changes in sales orders and sales forecasts in order to continuously optimise your purchasing and production plans
- Do you need to plan production by the minute for limited resources and use optimisation algorithms in planning? Are secondary as well as primary resources vital to your plan? We recommend the implementation of Preactor APS by Siemens
- Are you planning correctly? Do you know where any bottlenecks are? Find the answers in QAD Decision Support
Detailed production planning with Preactor APS by Siemens. We have installed Preactor APS for dozens of manufacturers to help optimise planning.
QAD Long-term planning
Owners expect to generate profits from their businesses. To achieve this you need to plan sales, production and purchasing targets at least a year in advance and be able to achieve them.
With QAD Long-term planning, you can:
- Align sales plans, production and purchasing
- Convert quantity and capacity plans into revenues and costs.
- Transfer quantity and capacity plans into revenues, cost and profit modelling
Features
- QAD enables you to set sales plans from historic data using statistical methods allowing you to anticipate monthly revenue
- QAD breaks down the sales plan into purchasing requirements and work orders. These purchasing and production plans are converted into projected monthly costs, highlighting time differences with the sales plan
- QAD checks the production plan against the capacity of your production resources and alerts you to any discrepancies
QAD Demand Management
Seasonal sales and promotions significantly increase the sales of goods. It is necessary to plan ahead to ensure sufficient stock levels are available. If you plan promotional sales of your products in a variety of chain stores, it is crucial to get the timing right to ensure availability of goods at every store. QAD Demand Management contains statistical and planning tools to generate sales forecasts by product and group in line with historical data as well the ability to simulate different scenarios.
With QAD Demand Management, you get:
- Product sales forecasts consistent with projected market behaviours
- Reduced inventory by interconnecting sales forecasting and production planning
- Increased revenue by minimising situations where stocks fail to cover demand
Features
- QAD enables sales history analysis, including filtering out any non-standard situations
- QAD supports replacements of discontinued products with new ones
- QAD uses sales history to prepare sales forecast models. It enables you to plan for promotions and seasons and prepare aggregations for product groups
- QAD proposes the optimal inventory levels and combines them with the sales forecasts for production and purchasing planning on an ongoing basis
QAD MRPII Planning Tool
Customers expect ever quicker responses to their requests. Manufacturing to stock generates an unacceptable increase in inventory and costs. QAD MRPII Planning is a tool that helps you manufacture and deliver on time.
With the QAD MRPII Planning Tool, you get:
- Optimised planning of product inventory, materials and work in progress to meet customer demands on time
- Time savings for planners and purchasers through dynamic manufacturing and procurement planning based on customer demands, work in progress and inventory
- Reduced lead times for complex, custom-developed products
- Elimination of delays caused by oversight in purchasing or manufacturing sub-components critical for the final product
Features
- • QAD accurately plans manufacturing and purchasing in response to sales orders, sales forecasts or customer schedules and call-offs. It dynamically uses work in progress, inventory, material in transit, current product structure and item optimisation parameters
- • The QAD MRPII Planning Tool assists the planner, enabling progress in simple steps:
- It generates a proposed overview production plan
- This is then checked against capacity and resource availability highlighting any issues
- The planner may intervene in the plan and decide how to resolve any issues
- QAD then develops the overview plan, including any amendments, into a detailed production plan
- This is then checked against the capacity of individual workstations
- V každém kroku QAD upozorňuje plánovače na úzká místa formou varovných zpráv.
- At each stage, QAD uses warning messages to alert the planner to any bottleneck sand enables changes to be made to rectify the situation
- QAD also supports planning across multiple company site locations, taking into account product cooperation and transport times.
Siemens Opcenter Scheduling & Planning (Preactor)
Have you mastered MRPII planning in your enterprise system and want to move to the next level to optimise your plan with advanced algorithms? Are you unhappy with the planning in your enterprise system and looking for a better planning tool? Siemens Opcenter Scheduling & Planning (Preactor) is a world-class solution that Minerva consultants have successfully implemented dozens of times with the QAD system as well as with other enterprise systems such as SAP, Infor or Scala.
With Siemens Opcenter Scheduling & Planning (Preactor), you get:
- Reduced product manufacture and delivery time
- Improved utilisation of manufacturing resources and reduced downtime due to missing materials
- Time savings for production planners and workshop managers
- Lower levels of work in progress
Features
- Long-term balancing of capacity load from the production plan using unlimited resource capacity. The purpose of this is to secure the resources necessary for the production plan. Realistic deadlines for new orders can be simulated
- Medium-term planning to determine realistic capacity schedules and material availability using limited resource capacity
- Short-term planning to optimise the work queue using limited primary and secondary resource capacity (machinery, tools, qualified operators, material availability). The optimisation algorithms seek to achieve the best results from the following KPIs:
- Capability of meeting delivery deadlines
- Inventory reduction
- Intermediate storage volume reduction
- Continuous production time
- Tool-setting time
- Minerva can extend the planning optimisation methods to suit your specific needs. We have implemented Preactor to manage painting lines, automated furniture production lines, etc.
