The Topwidth Production Planning & Scheduling Solution

Your customers are demanding higher levels of service, while your company's financial goals are pressuring you to deliver higher levels of productivity and return on investment from your manufacturing assets.

• Do you have the ability to simultaneously optimize constraints across multi-site manufacturing, distribution, and supplier networks?
• Do you have visibility and effective control of your entire manufacturing facility? Can you get additional throughput from existing resources?
• Can you make rapid, informed decisions when a production line goes down or when unexpected events occur on the shop floor?

Topwidth Manufacturing Planning and Scheduling provides end-to-end, multi-site manufacturing planning and scheduling from order commitment to the shop floor. Manufacturing organizations with multiple production plants and outsourced manufacturing locations can create optimized supply chain plans and collaborate with plants and external suppliers for production planning and detailed scheduling.

Topwidth Production Planning & Scheduling can help you:

• improve customer service and due-date performance
• reduce order fulfillment and manufacturing lead-times
• reduce inventory levels across the supply chain
• increase responsiveness to event and demand changes
• improve analysis for alternative strategies
• ensure ATP accuracy via improved planning and baseline visibility
• strengthen business relationships among trading partners
• increase capacity utilization
• synchronize production and purchasing to meet actual demand

Synchronize network-wide production

The Topwidth Production Planning and Scheduling (P&S) solution is an integrated set of intelligent planning engines designed to meet the specific needs of different manufacturing environments and that function together seamlessly to help bring collaborative planning and manufacturing management in line with your business goals. Manufacturing organizations with multiple production plants as well as outsourced manufacturing partners can use the solution to determine how best to meet the various demands placed on the supply network and to create realistic and optimal production plans.

P&S gives you the power to synchronize production, logistics, materials, and other resources across the entire network - from production work center, to multi-plant, to contract manufacturers and transaction partners - while simultaneously evaluating materials, manufacturing capacity, inventory, transportation, labor, distribution, and business objectives. The resulting corporate production plans can then be passed to the plant level for detailed scheduling and facilitation of collaboration with contract manufacturers and other trading partners. At the plant level, the solution is designed to optimize plant operations to meet customer orders while maximizing plant throughput and reducing inventories. This includes the creation of production schedules, optimization of constraints, coordination of materials, and the sequencing of jobs through the factory floor.

Expand your margins

The goal of P&S is to help you expand your margins. The clear benefits of driving down costs are enhanced by the ability to create lean, responsive operations that can increase your throughput and boost profits, return on investment, cash flow, and competitiveness.

Key components of the Production Planning & Scheduling solution include:

• Realistic Business Modeling: Provides the enterprise with a tool to effectively model the interaction between material flow and capacity so that both can be considered simultaneously by the optimization engines - whether for an enterprise, a plant, or a local department. The solution modeling tools give users the flexibility to model not only today's environment, but also adapt to future changes within the manufacturing environment.
  
  
• Constraint Management: Provides the ability to identify business constraints and optimize and manage these constraints by matching demand - all while respecting business rules and objectives.
  
  
• Buffer Management: Provides protection from anticipated but unforeseen disruptive events by calculating and allocating proper inventory buffers across the enterprise, manufacturing facilities, and manufacturing stages.
  
  
• Synchronization: Provides the ability to synchronize constraints and non-constraints across each step of the order fulfillment process - from order commitment to procurement to manufacturing. This helps ensure that the material flow is balanced across the enterprise so material waiting times and inventories are minimized and resource utilization is effectively utilized.
  
  
• Event Management & Analysis: Provides visibility, monitoring, alerting, and analysis of the extended manufacturing network. Capabilities extend beyond simply identifying the problem to providing resolution paths and simulation capabilities that allow for rapid and optimal correction of business exceptions.

A proven solution for your trading network - today and in the future

Topwidth has a proven track record of delivering results. As companies around the world have already discovered, Topwidth can help increase customer service levels, decrease inventory and lead-times, raise customer service levels, increase manufacturing throughput, and decrease operating costs. Building on the foundations of Enterprise Profit Optimization^TM, the Topwidth Manufacturing Planning & Scheduling solution can help deliver the manufacturing performance you need to meet your business and financial goals. The solution offers:

• robust, realistic modeling and intelligent planning engines
• constraint optimization across multi-site manufacturing, distribution, and supplier networks
• visibility to help control supply chain and manufacturing processes
• synchronization between operations
• 'what-if' scenarios for rapid understanding of the impact of each business decision
• faster, more accurate manufacturing planning
• network optimization and adaptive planning for rapid issue resolution
• exception detection and management
• complete, integrated solution
• rapid results and long-term support