September is a good season to present you one topic that kept us busy together with R&D over the past months.

Project is still ongoing but the very first flavor of it is available since 2023 Refresh 6 (more precisely 2023 fix 2330)

The main purpose is, from a planning standpoint, to manage shelf life from inventory to customer order, also taking into account planned Process Orders.
As you may have already experienced, the puzzle is quite simple at infinite capacity but becomes complex when applying finite capacity with any planning and scheduling solution! This new feature is the major breakthrough of 2023 for Ortems development team. Having a mature solution does not mean we stopped developing it.

The subject is vast and to apply to Agile development methodology, we decided a step by step approach.

What we already have

First package delivered is focused on the modelling evolution at ITEM and WO levels.

From now on you can define the shelf life required by your customer and the total shelf life of your various products (semi-finished and finished products).

To go a bit further, some more technicalities:

Depending on your product type, the shelf life can be either calculated based on planned production dates, or inherited from components / batches used for its own production. 

In order to enhance your preferred decision making tool, we also added new display and alert systems.

At WO level, 2 additional triangles to display WO requested expiration date (Orange) and WO current expiration date (Yellow).

If you face any conflict you will have a new WO color to highlight the criticality of the shelf life including pre-alert system. 100% being a kind of risky just in time, below 100%, customer request is fulfilled, above 100, the planning doesn't match customer shelf life request.

Criticality color is selected here in WO Gantt Chart. Also the pop up/hint windows has been enriched with additional shelf life information

Based on the shelf life criticality, you can also easily create your own filter, select and highlight for example the expired Process Orders (crit.>100%):

Also for global supervision, 2 additional docked KPI have been added

First KPI: Percentage expressing the average shelf life criticality, a kind of planning stress gauge regarding shelf life respect.

Second KPI: the number of Process Orders with shelf life violation. Based on that indicator, you open a dedicated dashboard to analyze and solve these issues.

Short term perspectives

Second Work Package will be focused on STOCK ORDER management and is planned for early 2024 version (GA or Refresh 1). It includes new modelling options, visualizations and alerts.

This new object will be able to model material lots with their own quantity and expiration date. SRP netting rules will also apply to these lots allowing the dedicated, distributed or mixed supply types.

Last part (2024 refresh xx) will be the icing (or the cherry) on the cake!! All 3 Calculation Engines will be enhanced to integrate shelf life into the plan optimization!

Please note that some new GUI and related advanced features will be delivered in different sprints (2024 refreshes) but we ensure the core capabilities will be available following the described timeline.

Wrap up

These new developments apply at first place in Life Science and Pharmaceutical industry but will also be able to handle CPG-R (cosmetic, food,…) shelf life as well as modelling some specific constraints in A&D(composite e.g.). The new Stock order entity can also help covering new valuable use cases in Cable or Metal industry!! We’ll take time to detail a bit more this when the solution will be developed.

More information to come by the end of the year with our traditional "What's New 2024"!

Special thanks to DELMIA Ortems R&D as well as other colleagues from IPS, IPE development & Industry teams as they keep on contributing to make it happen.