Production Capacity Planning Using Supply Chain Design Software Tools

Your manufacturing plans have to meet the requirements of your supply chain, including demand, shipping terms, downstream inventory policies, and more. In order to fulfill these needs, your production capacity planning software tools have to provide the instruments for finding and justifying solutions and calculating the ROI of your network change decisions.

Use anyLogistix (ALX) as manufacturing planning software to adapt your supply chain design and policies to get ahead of the game in the ever-changing global economy.

Manufacturing Footprint Optimization

ALX will allow you to choose where to locate production sites, what commodities they should manufacture, and what capacities they should carry. Find the best solutions to your production supply chain challenges, including:

• Moving your facility to a low-cost country, taking into account transportation lead times and service levels.
• Outsourcing production of some parts (offshoring or nearshoring), and choosing optimal supplier combinations.
• Balancing capacity to demand across the whole bill of materials (BOM), considering demand volatility.

Manufacturing Capacity Planning

Sometimes, a specific operation at a certain manufacturing site can become a bottleneck for a whole supply chain. ALX allows you to model production processes at site-level to determine the root cause of manufacturing capacity constraints, for instance:

• Specific production line throughput
• Equipment utilization rate, staff work shifts
• Buffer zones’ storage capacities

For a deeper dive into capacity planning of manufacturing, you can watch the following how-to video. The video will show you how to perform what-if scenarios in anyLogistix to estimate their capability to satisfy the daily production plan.

Production Capacity Planning with anyLogistix software

Managing Workload across Manufacturing Sites

With ALX, you will be able to test multiple scenarios, including emergency situations, to find out how to distribute the workload across several manufacturing sites in the best way. In the model, you will be able to take into account a wide range of constraints, for example:

• Site capacities and associated costs
• Transportation costs and lead times for each site, taking into account risks
• Areas and clients supplied by each site, considering demand uncertainty
• Tariffs and taxes in different countries

Production Inventory Planning

Raw and packing materials, MRO, work-in-progress, and in-transit inventory all have to be considered during the manufacturing capacity planning process. Here is what you can take into account in ALX to determine better solutions in production inventory planning:

• Prices and lead time probabilities for different suppliers
• Variability in demand for multiple BOM components
• Storage capacity limitations
• Multi-echelon inventory and lead time fluctuations

WHY CARRY OUT MANUFACTURING CAPACITY PLANNING WITH ALX SOFTWARE?

ALX complements traditional mathematical optimization techniques with simulation capabilities. Simulation models allow you to improve forecasting efficiency in comparison to traditional analytical production capacity planning software tools. With ALX, you can:

• Consider risks and uncertainties in your supply chain models.
• Simulate production sites inside four walls, down to the level of distinct workstations.
• Achieve more precise and credible results than with traditional analytical tools.

Looking for production capacity planning tools? Start building your simulation model with anyLogistix software.