This article describes the production policy, which is applied to the replenishment orders that are placed by factories to themselves when the inventory lacks components that are used in production of the customer demanded products.

As of anyLogistix 3.4.1 the production process considers production lines a factory has. These production lines are not product-specific and can be changed to switch production from one product type to another.

By default a factory has one production line, which is a basic tool that has no parameters. The new mechanism introduces an unlimited number of production lines a factory may have. The production lines may be of different types with different setups. Once a factory obtains a set of production lines it also acquires ability to hold a backlog of production orders and the ability to prioritize such orders as well (as the products the orders contain) based on the defined priority rule.

Let us assume that your supply chain has a production policy for certain products. A factory inventory has certain amount of components Product 1, Product 2, etc., (produced by this factory) that are used to produce Product A. The inventory runs low and the factory places an order to itself to produce Product 1.
At this point the new mechanism can be used to define additional production conditions. We will follow the steps below:

1. Create a new production line in the Production Lines table type and specify the number of lines of this type the factory will have.
2. Since the factory produces several components it needs either several line types (one per component production) or the ability to apply a changeover to this line type.
   
3. Now we update the production policy by specifying the production lines that are available at this factory in the Production Lines column of the required record. Now the products from the production orders will occupy the specified line types.

   If no line is specified in the Production Lines column the factory will continue using its default non-customizable production line.

4. If a line has a changeover allowing it to produce Product 2 instead of Product 1, and we want it to occupy an empty non-conflicting production line, we should set the Multi-line allocation type in the production parameters.
5. Now, all the orders in the backlog form a queue based on the FIFO priority. The Production Orders Priority allows us to configure the queue by changing the priority type, which determines which production orders are selected.
6. If the backlog contains multiple production orders with Product 1, and the inventory comes across a severe shortage of Product 2, the backlog queue can be reordered by assigning a higher Product Production Priority to the required component.

The data on this advanced production process is collected by the following statistics:

• Production Lines Table
• Production Orders Table
• Production Orders Schedule Table
• Production Orders Table
• Changeover Cost
• Total Cost
• Production Line Utilization
• Changeover Time
• Production Line Busy Time
• Production Line Idle Time
• Production Order Backlog Time

How can we improve this article?

Send