DELMIAOperationsConsulting Business Quintiq production planning
DELMIA Quintiq Scheduler has a very interesting functionality, that is a bit of a speciality, namely OrderCombiner. The OrderCombiner has been used in various occasions in Steel, Aluminium and Copper, in cases that a company produces coils or sheets, and a customer order quantity can be (significantly) less than an order, or the quantities are simply not aligned with full input coils. Furthermore, customer orders typically have different widths and require matching characteristics (p.e. thickness, surface type, alloys or steel grades, etc.).
In such case, the OrderCombiner functionality allows to assign orders onto input materials, which can actually be semi-finished goods, as well as purchased hotrolled or coldrolled coils. The puzzle is to make optimum use of the input coil by combining with-wise orders next to each other, lengthwise after each other, or even combine it all. These combinations are showing as a pattern, a 2D visualization of the input material and how the orders are assigned on it. Below are two nice examples:
First pattern is rather simple, one order taking all of the material. The second is a rather complex pattern, multiple orders are combined width-wise and multiple are combined lengthwise. Additionally, at the bottom there’s some grey areas, which represent unassigned parts of the material.
I hope you can imagine that this type of puzzle might sometimes be straightforward, but can easily also become really complex, and hard for a human planner to find the best solution. Often we have also seen that if combining is required in a metals business, the planner makes these combinations once, some weeks in advance, but does not reconsider when new orders come into play.
For those reasons our R&D/AppDev has made this solution available, with the usual Quintiq capabilities, like good visualization, ease of use, support for all relevant business rules, and of course also including an optimizer that generates proper patterns in a fraction of the time that a human planner would need. If you are interested to see more of this solution, I can advise you to search for the OrderCombiner video on the DELMIA Quintiq Solutions portal, it shows in about 9 minutes very clearly the basic capabilities.
We have implemented this solution for a number of customers, but as far as I know, only in metals companies. I would be really interested to hear from you, if you would see any other market where such puzzle exists, and where we could use this solution as well.
