Extended what-if analysis capabilities
ILOG Plant PowerOps provides an easy-to-use "what-if" analysis module that enables planners, operations managers and industrial engineers to simulate production scenarios and compare schedules with KPIs and graphical displays. By simulating alternatives and comparing them through key metrics, manufacturers can make better decisions. Plant- or business-specific KPIs can be easily integrated into ILOG Plant PowerOps, providing the exact metrics required by plant executives.
With extended functionality for what-if analysis, reporting and master data editing, ILOG Plant PowerOps is the perfect tool for designing plants and processes. Industrial engineers and production planners can now collaborate on making decisions affecting plant profitability. Engineers can validate their models by generating realistic schedules using manufacturing data, supply and demand constraints, and the same sophisticated optimization technology used by their colleagues in the manufacturing industry.
Precise operational models
ILOG Plant PowerOps captures true manufacturing constraints by modeling multi-dimensional changeovers, cleaning and maintenance rules, convergent and divergent material flows, recipes with sequential tasks and precedence constraints, tanks, and shelf life. These detailed models enable the system to generate truly feasible plans with detailed schedules that can be actually used operationally.
Models effectively manage:
- Tanks
- Resource connections
- Cleaning activities with associated resource requirements
- Changeover time and cost
- Batching policies
- Intermediate products, co-products and by-products
- Shelf life and maturation time
Inventory optimization for manufacturing
ILOG Plant PowerOps is the first tool on the market that can set safety stock targets and generate production plans—all within one global optimization model that takes into account demand variability. Before the introduction of ILOG PPO, safety stock targets were set using guesswork, formulas or algorithms based on average production lead times. Planners would then build production plans that were sometimes far off the assumed average lead time, invalidating targets. This kind of mistake leads to maintaining the wrong inventory at the wrong time, producing lower service levels and higher inventory levels than necessary. ILOG Plant PowerOps' new global optimization feature makes certain that the safety stock perfectly covers production and demand variability, leading to improved service levels and reduced inventories.
