The current financial crisis and its impact on the steel industry show the importance of the ability to coordinate business objectives flexibly and on short notice. No matter whether the objectives are for less/more throughput, better customer service or cost optimization, within the PSImetals product family the Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS) functions support our customers in optimizing the supply chain.

 

As you know, companies' sub-goals to be optimized (and especially those of the different production areas) often contradict each other. A typical example would be the conflict be-tween meeting deadlines as accurately as possible and aiming at maximizing the throughput ratio. A single optimization of the job order regarding the agreed deadlines results in a large product variation within the day’s program. This product variation can be produced on time through frequent re-equipping (e.g. reducing the sequence lengths at the steel mill), provided the negative consequences of a reduced facility workload and the impact on the whole supply chain in form of a reduced added value are accepted. This way, missing throughput at the be-ginning of the process chain (e.g. at the continuous casting facilities) can lead to follow-up problems in the form of a gap in the supply with primary material or poorly implementation of stock structures for the downstream facilities.

 

This clearly shows that targets and KPIs for production planning need to be subject to a holis-tic approach. Stock management plays a key role in the steel and aluminum producing indus-tries, which are known for their complexity.

 

Stocks: Result or precondition?

 

Stock levels and structures are the proved key figures for coordinating the cross-sequence ma-terial flow in nearly all planning offices within the metal primary material industry.
Apart from minimizing stocks as an objective, especially the demand-driven range control of stocks plays a crucial role here in order to guarantee deadline-oriented material flow across the whole supply chain.

 

Hence, stocks must not only be the result of optimization processes, but stock specifications need to be definable as side conditions in the form of quantities and structures. The workload can then be optimized regarding deadlines and throughput ratios within the “tolerance” speci-fied here.

 

New release closes market gap

 

Looking at the market for metal-specific planning software, the topic described here has only been taken into consideration quite poorly. PSI BT closes this gap by releasing the new PSImetals APS, and provides all the benefits of optimized planning, along with additional parallel specification of structured stocks objectives.

 

The cross-sequence rejection of orders is now possible, adhering to minimum and maximum target stocks.

 

This way scheduling results are avoided which are not based on practice-oriented stocks lev-els and structures. The new stocks management is an integrated component of the PSImetals APS optimization model, and combines complex algorithmic methods with the planners' prac-tical experience in controlling their production facilities.

 

The new KPI board can also check whether the operative main business objectives have been realized or not. Indicators forecast future stock development (stock/per product), adherence to deadlines and workload. Deviances from the objectives are indicated via alert messages. Ob-jectives and their limits can be freely configured and thus enable flexible decision support, able to gear the arrangement of production plans towards current business objectives at any time.

 

PSImetals APS: Planning adhering to minimum and maximum target stocks