MPS Company Planner ​​​​​​​Quintiq SolutionUpdate ​​​​​​​

DELMIA Quintiq CompanyPlanner has a very strong built-in planning optimizer, which can be run in various modes. The most important modes are mentioned below.

Full (re)optimization
Based on current inputs regarding material, customer demands, safety stock definitions and scheduling feedback, the optimizer builds up a new plan from scratch. As you can imagine, during this optimization, there is no usable plan before the final steps are done. Therefore this planning run is most often done after working hours, to not hinder the planners.

Iterative, or incremental optimization
Based on the current plan, and potentially some imported changes to the input data, the optimizer re-evaluates the current plan and adapts it to improve the plan in smaller iterations. Meanwhile the users can still work with the system, and they can see the improvements immediately.

There are some good reasons why a regular rebuild from scratch does make sense, but the additional opportunity to let the optimizer solve smaller new challenges on the fly, brings nice new opportunities on the table.

A few obvious opportunities are:

• Online CTP, which is not just planning on top of an existing plan, but could really move orders around to find a good solution for the newly received orders.
• Finding a solution for a certain material that has quality issues, and see if material can be reorganized amongst orders in an attempt to keep orders being delivered on time.
• Finding a good time window for a required maintenance on a certain resource

These challenges can nicely be supported with the combination of using scenarios and the iterative optimizer, but obviously there are many more situations.

Question to you: which other situations could you think of, where the iterative optimizer can be of help?