Advanced planning and scheduling (APS, also known as advanced manufacturing) refers to a
manufacturing management process by which
raw materials
A raw material, also known as a feedstock, unprocessed material, or primary commodity, is a basic material that is used to produce goods, finished goods, energy, or intermediate materials that are feedstock for future finished products. As feedst ...
and production capacity are optimally allocated to meet demand. APS is especially well-suited to environments where simpler planning methods cannot adequately address complex trade-offs between competing priorities. Production scheduling is intrinsically very difficult due to the (approximately)
factorial
In mathematics, the factorial of a non-negative denoted is the product of all positive integers less than or equal The factorial also equals the product of n with the next smaller factorial:
\begin
n! &= n \times (n-1) \times (n-2) \t ...
dependence of the size of the solution space on the number of items/products to be manufactured.
Difficulty of production planning
Traditional
production planning
Production planning is the planning of production and manufacturing modules in a company or industry. It utilizes the resource allocation of activities of employees, materials and production capacity, in order to serve different customers.Farghe ...
and
scheduling
A schedule or a timetable, as a basic time-management tool, consists of a list of times at which possible task (project management), tasks, events, or actions are intended to take place, or of a sequence of events in the chronological order ...
systems (such as
manufacturing resource planning
Manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) is defined as a method for the effective planning of all resources of a manufacturing company. Ideally, it addresses operational planning in units, financial planning, and has a simulation capability to a ...
) use a stepwise procedure to allocate material and production capacity. This approach is simple but cumbersome, and does not readily adapt to changes in demand, resource capacity or material availability. Materials and capacity are planned separately, and many systems do not consider material or capacity constraints, leading to infeasible plans. However, attempts to change to the new system have not always been successful, which has called for the combination of management philosophy with manufacturing.
Unlike previous systems, APS simultaneously plans and schedules production based on available materials, labor and plant capacity.
APS has commonly been applied where one or more of the following conditions are present:
#
make to order (as distinct from
make to stock Build to stock, or ''make to stock'', often abbreviated as ''BTS'' or ''MTS'', is a build-ahead production approach in which production plans may be based upon sales forecasts and/or historical demand. BTS is a usually associated with the Industrial ...
) manufacturing
#capital-intensive
production processes, where plant capacity is constrained
#products 'competing' for plant capacity: where many different products are produced in each facility
#products that require a large number of components or manufacturing tasks
#production necessitates frequent schedule changes which cannot be predicted before the event
#Haycad-infotech.bg
Advanced planning & scheduling software enables manufacturing scheduling and advanced scheduling optimization within these environments.
Further reading
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References
[{{Cite web, url=http://www.apics.org/apics-for-individuals/apics-magazine-home/magazine-detail-page/2015/08/14/fueling-the-future-with-apics, title=Fueling the Future with APICS {{! APICS Magazine, website=www.apics.org, language=en, access-date=2018-10-06]
Production planning