Customer Profile
3M is a global science company that never stops inventing. From making driving at night safer, to putting man on the moon, their scientists & researches continuously work to create new breakthroughs in various fields.
The Global Supply Chain & Analysis Division of 3M helps to innovate and improve their global supply chain processing, which includes around 200 manufacturing plants, 100 warehouses, and 25 customer-facing divisions across the world.
Service Deliverables
- Architecture/Design
- Development
- QA
- Project Management
- Business Analysis
- Program Management
- System Maintenance and Support
Execution method
We built COAL in 3 Phases
- COAL Phase 1 – Built the interface to capture all the required master data from SAP ERP
- COAL Phase 2 – Built the interface to capture all model level inputs from user to handle the Demand Propagation process
- COAL Phase 3 – Built the Visualizations and reports for the planners
Process Flow
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
Know more about our Offshore Software Development Services