Manufacturing

Accomplish key objectives:

• Optimize profitability and order fulfillment performance
• Ensure schedule feasibility and reliability
• Reschedule operations quickly
• Understand profitability and customer service trade-offs
• Manage customer and vendor relationships more precisely
• Improve the new product introduction process

Effectively support:

• Demand-driven manufacturing initiatives
• Cooperation between planners and plant operations schedulers
• Fine-grained decisions in the order management or purchasing process
• Analytic or transactional decision-making extensions to SAP and Oracle
• Operational adjustments after mergers and acquisitions

Manufacturing companies today face rapid change and tough global competition. Demand-driven manufacturing initiatives with smaller order sizes and direct store deliveries are picking up steam. New products are on the rise. Mergers and acquisitions can change supply chain designs in a heartbeat, and pressures to improve efficiency continue. It has never been more important to be agile and innovative.

Improved planning and scheduling systems and more fine-grained and flexible decision-making processes within transactional applications are needed. As the leader in optimization and technology, IBM can help.

Optimization is the technology at the heart of most supply chain planning and scheduling solutions. This technology can help you make the most out of your enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain applications—whether by extending analytic capabilities or by making better decisions in the high volume order management or purchase management processes.

IBM helps manufacturers by providing:

• Supply chain planning applications for network design and inventory optimization
• Supply chain scheduling applications for integrated production planning and detailed scheduling in process and semiconductor manufacturing
• Pre-built, best-in-class optimization models for integrated production planning and detailed scheduling in process and semiconductor manufacturing
• Custom planning and scheduling solutions—based on custom optimization models—that fit your unique decision-making challenges, eliminating the compromises that sometimes come with generic applications or Excel-based solutions
• Scheduling precision—by the minute, rather than by the hour or day
• Metrics and trend analyses that capture both operational efficiency and financial performance
• State-of-the-art "what-if" analysis, scenario comparison and goal balancing
• The ability to make decisions based on data stored in multiple systems

IBM ILOG ODM Enterprise
Whether your problem is strategic planning, cutting and trimming, or truck loading, IBM’s complete system of development tools and engines and our optimization experts can build you a state-of-the-art custom planning or scheduling application.

Exercise your optimization model(s) fully with “what-if” analysis, scenario comparison and goal balancing. Optimization engines execute with the best performance and optimization accuracy available, and provide controlled relaxation of binding constraints, sensitivity analysis, explanations, and other valuable features. ODMS-based applications incorporate superb visual displays of input data, solutions (plans or schedules) and key performance indicators (KPIs).