Application Development - Capacity Optimization & Asset Loading (COAL)

Customer Situation

• 3M wanted to have a common system to manage the Capacity planning needs for the global operations taking place in various sites around the world
• They were using a legacy product for their Capacity Planning needs, but most of the Customer operations were being handled outside the system
• Translating the End-Customer demand into individual work center and operation demand, was not effectively done with the legacy system
• Multi-Echelon based Business Analytical model was required for the Inventory Optimizations, but the existing product was Single-Echelon based
• Consolidated Extended Value stream view was unavailable for effective planning

Congruent’s Solution

Congruent developed COAL as a .NET web-based application targeting the Capacity Planning (CRP) Requirements from 3M Global Supply Chain. Given below the overview of the solution

• Access to COAL is controlled by a Windows Single-Sign on credentials for easy access
• Integrate with SAP and synchronize the master data from SAP into COAL
• Create Planning models with the Product demand as user input
• Setup the BOM and Route for each product within the planning model
• Load the Demand splits across the work centers
• Propagate the end Customer demand upstream in Routing
• Identify the demand for each Semi-Finished good, Operation/Work center wise
• Planning model can be either Time based or Capacity based. Calculate the below
  • Time based Model - The Total hours required across Work Centers vs. Available hours in the work centers
  • Capacity based model - The Total Quantity of Semi-finished goods required from Work centers vs Available Capacity in the work centers
• Clone the existing model for ‘what-if’ / scenario analysis with work center loading changes
• Produce Control Charts for the Demand vs Capacity for each Planning period
• Produce Consolidated Extended value stream visualization for each planning period
• Produce Days of Inventory Visualizations