ILOG Plant PowerOps 3.1 Offers Industry-First Dynamic Safety Stock for True Demand-Driven Manufacturing
October 22 2008 - 12:00AM
PR Newswire (US)
ILOG Plant PowerOps 3.1 Is The First Tool On The Market That Can
Generate An Optimal Production And Inventory Plan Based On Service
Levels And Demand Variability. SUNNYVALE, Calif. and PARIS, Oct. 22
/PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ILOG(R) (Nasdaq: ILOG; Euronext: ILO,
ISIN: FR0004042364) today unveiled ILOG Plant PowerOps 3.1, the
latest version of ILOG's integrated planning and scheduling
solution, featuring industry-first support for dynamic safety
stocks. This capability can help companies both reduce inventories
and improve service and is a major step towards achieving
demand-driven manufacturing. Plant PowerOps (PPO) 3.1, part of
ILOG's LogicTools suite of Supply Chain Applications, is the first
product on the market with global optimization capability that can
plan production by taking into account service level targets and
demand variability. PPO 3.1 also provides new plant design and
process design capabilities that enable both industrial engineers
and production planners to collaborate on decision-making for plant
profitability. Rising prices of raw materials is pushing the Food
and Beverage and fast-moving Consumer Goods industries to focus on
reducing inventories and to produce in smaller batches while
maintaining very high levels of service. Before the availability of
PPO 3.1, safety stock targets would be set at the plant using
guess-work, formulas or algorithms that make strong assumptions on
the production lead times. Based on the safety stock targets,
planners would build a production plan that may be far from the
initial assumptions, therefore invalidating the stock targets. This
scenario could then lead to maintaining the wrong amount of
inventory, resulting in either higher inventory levels than
necessary or stock-outs which hurt service levels. Leveraging a
global optimization model, PPO 3.1 provides a holistic view
spanning from demand variability to safety stock targets to
production plan. This capability limits decisions making based on
product plan assumptions -- and vice-versa, production plans that
are generated based on faulty safety stock decisions. The benefits
of this new global optimization capability are that the safety
stock now perfectly covers production and demand variability,
leading to improved service levels and reduced inventories. Better
Collaboration Between Designers and Manufacturing Before the
availability of PPO 3.1, using simulation tools, engineers were
able to model the details of chemical and biological reactions but
due to the limited optimization capabilities of these tools, they
were unable to generate realistic schedules taking into account all
manufacturing constraints. PPO 3.1 provides extended
functionalities for what-if analysis, master data editing and
reporting with interfaces for industrial engineers and production
planners, allowing them to share the same data. Industrial
engineers can easily simulate different plant configurations using
a simple user interface. It enables them to discover hidden
bottlenecks and to make strategic decisions based on realistic
simulations of manufacturing schedules. This greatly improves
collaboration between design and manufacturing. This collaboration
is essential in the biotech and the pharmaceutical industries where
plant and process design are often a top priority due to high
equipment costs and the long time necessary to obtain FDA
approvals. Other new features include: -- Import/export to Excel:
planners and industrial engineers are now able to run what-if
analysis by modifying planning data in MS Excel. -- Master data
editing: changing the master data can be complex and time
consuming. PPO 3.1 offers extended functionalities to perform this
type of simulation extremely easily. -- Multi-site planning:
production planners can now consider different plants and
warehouses in a distribution planning view. A warehouse summary
view has also been added to analyze the details of a multi-site
plan. -- Interactive Production Planning: planners can now easily
interact with a Master Production Schedule by changing and fixing
production or delivery decisions and re-optimizing the plan ILOG's
LogicTools suite of Supply Chain Applications capitalizes on ILOG's
20 years of leadership in optimization and LogicTools' supply chain
customers, expertise and thought leadership. More than 250
companies use the LogicTools suite for network design, production
sourcing, inventory optimization, transportation planning, as well
as production planning and scheduling. With the acquisition of
LogicTools, the company founded in 1995 by David Simchi-Levi,
Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT, ILOG today provides
solutions that complement Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
systems and enable companies to make better decisions faster by
optimizing their logistics networks and transportation strategy,
setting safety stock levels for their sales and operations planning
and improving their plant operations through sophisticated
production planning and detailed scheduling. About ILOG ILOG
delivers software and services that empower customers to make
better decisions faster and manage change and complexity. Over
3,000 corporations and more than 465 leading software vendors rely
on ILOG's market-leading business rule management system (BRMS),
supply chain and planning and scheduling applications, and
optimization and visualization software components, to achieve
dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining products and
services, and sharpen their competitive edge. ILOG was founded in
1987 and employs more than 850 people worldwide. For more
information, please visit http://www.ilog.com/ ILOG and ILOG Plant
PowerOps are trademarks of ILOG S.A. All other trademarks are the
properties of their respective owners. DATASOURCE: ILOG CONTACT:
Monika Raj of ILOG, +1-408-991-7128, Web site: http://www.ilog.com/
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