Efficient Production Planning is the need of the hour. Planning can look very cumbersome, time-taking and tiring activity but when results start coming in, one can realize the worth of a thoughtful plan.
Proper planning of an order not only improves the overall productivity but also helps in improving profit margins. Polygon Software, a leading developer of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions for apparel businesses, announced PolyPM Production Planning, the first apparel specific production scheduling solution fully integrated with PLM and ERP.
Team StitchWorld talks to Mickey Wohlmuth, V-P (Sales & Marketing), Polygon Software.
Proper planning improves the manufacturer’s ability to perform and meet buyers’ expectations like on-time delivery performance, reducing lead times and costs therefore prices, social compliances (too much overtime, unauthorized sub-contracting), etc. So ultimately the ability to make a realistic plan and achieve it consistently affects the bottom line profitability of any business!
Polygon Software, a 30-year-old US-based company with a long and accomplished history of developing leading-edge software for the garment industry recently developed PolyPM which is the first solution to integrate PDM/PLM and ERP into a single application with quite elaborate production planning module best suited to handle all production queries.
Based on today’s client/server and internet technology, Polygon’s PolyPM enables the enterprise to integrate all aspects of product development, sourcing, manufacturing and distribution processes under a common platform. In the industry, these applications are known as Product Data Management (PDM) or Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
In short all the planning needs of the company is taken care of and combined to one common platform called PolyPM.
PolyPM as an ERP
As the first apparel specific production scheduling solution fully integrated with PLM/ERP, businesses will realize a faster return on their investment through real-time Material Resource Planning (MRP) integration, greater flexibility to adjust to changing labour, sourcing and raw material resources and customer demands. Businesses can easily obtain an investment returns in months. PolyPM Production Planning provides instantaneous feedback at all levels of the enterprise when changes are made. Businesses use PolyPM to realize more efficient workflow, improved productivity and cost reductions. PolyPM creates an environment that lets the management get decision making information when and how it needs it, to ensure faster time-to-market and exploit new business opportunities. Plus, PolyPM is flexible enough to change with business conditions, so management won’t need a cadre of programmers to customize and restructure the system as business conditions change.
Planning Board
PolyPM’s color-coded Planning Board lets users instantly get the status of hundreds of production orders in a single glance. Key features in PolyPM’s Production Planning solution include:
- A fully customizable, color-coded Planning Board showing the relationship between required and available resources for thousands of production orders at a glance.
- A two-level interactive planning structure that enables management to develop weekly plans at the enterprise level months ahead and plan specific daily production at the line level.
- Color-coded alerts for material availability in MRP, on-time and late delivery with fully customizable tool-tips that instantly show detail on any production item.
- Automatic and manual planning of production items that greatly simplifies the planning process when hundreds of new production orders are added.
- Ability to view the Planning Board according to forecast and scheduled production. Scheduled production shows over- and under-capacity while forecast production shows actual production as per given current capacity.
- Production analysis based on standardized production units or based on actual units projected to be produced.
Automated planning is based on scheduling the production item at the latest date in order to complete in time to ship. The design of the application makes it easy to add new rules of automated planning based on a customer’s requirements. Automated planning call also takes place for a block of production at a time or for all unplanned production orders. The system also has the ability to group production orders together into one production block based on user-specified rules in order to simplify the planning board by allowing the planner to schedule multiple production orders in a single block.
Report Generation
PolyPM has integrated Crystal Reports as the standard report development tool. This gives the user the ability to create virtually any type of report that is built on the data that is maintained in the application. Any data in PolyPM may also be instantly exported to Excel. Initial reports include the ability to print the production plan in color and print out status reports based on the schedule. Of course, related to this are the hundreds of other reports that are already available in PolyPM for orders, manufacturing, inventory, WIP, purchasing, receiving and so on.
Merchandising Control
Pre-production (critical path control) is linked with planning board. The critical path control is on raw materials and order required date. The Planning Board instantly shows a status color for a production order if the materials will be late or are not going to be available or if the order is going to be completed late.
In the second release of Production Planning, the company plans to integrate the Production Orders to our time & action calendaring sub-system. This will allow the user to be able to see the critical path for multiple resources in a factory. For example, a production order may show an alert status if the sewing is scheduled to start on a certain date, but the screen printing which must be done before hand will not be complete by that date. PolyPM already has a very extensive best-of-breed time and action calendaring solution for tracking production.
