Global Automatization of Capacity Planning in Production

The increasing variance in the product portfolio of production companies continues to complicate the balance between the market demand and the available production capacities.

To address this problem, there needs to be increased flexibility of the production network, more transparency in relevant processes, and optimized vertical integration in the value-added chain from the raw part to the finished product. This should bring about more reliable and faster results in capacity planning.

As part of a company-wide project at an automotive OEM, PEC was tasked to help with the design and optimization of the program and capacity planning process. Our main tasks included:

• Definition of requirements for a new cloud-based IT system with the objective of automatically spreading customer demands across production capacities.

• Coordination with internal departments (manufacturing engineering, logistics, IT) and the enterprise software vendor.

• Acted as Product Owner in agile development team according to SCRUM logic:
  • Definition of use-cases for testing
  • Organization of test sessions
  • Validation and verification of the system

• Training of key users and information campaigns 

• Organization of the rollout of the new capacity planning process and IT system.