Savour the benefits of production scheduling
Peter Hunt's Bakery Foods, the Bolton-based savoury products baker, is starting to see the benefits of improved production planning since installing an advanced demand forecasting and planning system. It is just completing the production scheduling part of the installation, but already reports positive results.
"We now have the planning side in place, which tells us precisely when we need to make a particular product," says Simon Aspinall, the company's demand and forecast manager. "As a bakery we have tight timelines and other production issues, such as minimising our changeovers by running jobs in logical sequence."
Peter Hunt's starts the week making fruit-, cheese- or other vegetarian-based products, before moving on to meat goods. If the sequence were organised the other way round, it would require big wash downs and production delays.
"To be as agile as possible with regard to ensuring all production follows the best logical sequence, FuturMaster is currently writing a scheduling tool that will automate and optimise this procedure," says Aspinall. "Many of us thought this wouldn't have been possible, but having seen initial test results we have been really impressed by the system."
By June this year, installation of a FuturMaster software package was virtually complete, although the company was still checking the results of the new system tallied with those produced with its old spreadsheet way of working. "We are still not 100% reliant on the system for our demand forecasting, planning and scheduling operations," says Aspinall. "However, FuturMaster will soon take over completely."
On the forecasting side, the system will be able to work out what capacity will most likely be required for each job - based on shifts, storage and cost. "It will allow us to work out our required budget on a day-to-day basis so, with future forecasting information included, we will be able more accurately to work out our budgets for the next financial year," says Aspinall. "The forecasting information can be fed straight into the planning module, which can ensure we are aware of what we need to make over a given time period and how to plan production on the shop floor as efficiently as possible."
In terms of production planning, Peter Hunt's can now determine what effect a customer's product promotion will have on production in any period of time and forecast required capacity. It can also more accurately work out capacity requirements and feasibility based on other production tasks.
- See feature on p30
