S&OP MPS Scheduling Quintiq
In planning solutions, the use of campaigns is a common practice. On the level of Production Planning (or MPS), the campaigns make sure that certain operations are gathered within a certain time frame, in most cases because else we would easily be creating an infeasible situation for the Scheduling level. On Scheduling level, these campaigns often are derived from the sequences that are built, and they have as a goal to make the production efficient for a certain resource. In any case, these campaigns are an input for the planning, defining constraints towards capacity usage.
In Metals production (where I have most experience with the campaigns) for instance, this is used to make sure that proper sized batches are created for the melt-cast area, or for galvanizing lines. But there is also sometimes a need to predefine a specific type of production that is a bit rare, but requires materials to be grouped for production. An example of that is the production of tread plate in Aluminium, where you need a special work roll for the final cold rolling step. This type of campaign is then just defined a few times a month or so, and for a short time window. And this type of campaign needs to be defined both on Scheduling and on Production Planning level.
These are typically all valid uses of Campaigns in Production Planning and in Scheduling, where we are planning in daily buckets or in continuous time.
But what about S&OP? In that planning level, we typically plan in monthly buckets, or occasionally in weekly buckets. How do campaigns make sense in that area. For the metals examples, in my opinion it is not really applicable, because for Melt-Cast we typically see recurring patterns, and product mix decisions may even decide on the size of the individual campaigns, so it seems to be not an input, but more an output.
Still we have many customers that ask us if we have campaign capabilities in S&OP, and for that reason I would like to understand if anyone of you has a good case for campaign needs (as an input) in S&OP. I am curious for your responses.
