by Kelsey H | Mar 4, 2024 | Planning & Scheduling, Process Improvement
In many real-world manufacturing environments, disruptions occur frequently, forcing unexpected adjustments to their production schedules. Some of these disruptions, such as supply chain delays or equipment breakdowns, are simply inevitable, even for the most proactive and prepared organizations.
Naturally, changes to the production schedule will affect the timeline of when the output can be completed. However, there are also other unexpected ripple effects of schedule changes that can impact the site’s broader operations. Understanding the full impact of scheduling adjustments can help your team better proactively prepare for these situations, as well as look for solutions that will minimize the ramifications of each change.
Inventory Management
One common consequence of production schedule changes is that raw material inventory will be higher or lower than previously projected. For example, if a start time is delayed by two hours, the raw product will need to be stored for two hours longer than planned. This can cause issues if your plant is tight on inventory space. You may unexpectedly lack space for incoming deliveries. On the other hand, if a different project is moved up in the schedule to replace the delayed run, sites following a just-in-time inventory philosophy may not have the necessary materials available yet.
Managing inventory during production schedule changes can be especially challenging for industries like biopharmaceutical manufacturing, which may have raw materials with strict storage requirements. If product is stored for too long (or not long enough) at suboptimal temperatures, it may result in wasted resources, which increases costs and causes further disruptions. To avoid these problems, it’s critical to consider inventory requirements when adjusting the production schedule.
Capacity Utilization
If constant schedule changes are leaving your plant continuously behind on production, it can become very difficult to accurately track your site’s data. When schedule decisions are made on the fly and operations are in flux on a day-to-day basis, your team may not be able to accurately measure the site’s true capacity limits.
Accurate data on site capacity utilization is crucial if your organization has goals to increase profitability or introduce new products to the plant. If the site can’t determine whether it has any capacity available, it hinders its ability to make smart decisions about new projects or scale up production on a product with surging demand. It can also be difficult to properly forecast and plan around future demand. As a result, the company is forced to miss out on maximizing output and landing potential sales they could have earned with a smarter scheduling solution.
Overtime
Depending on how long production is delayed during a schedule change, your site may need to utilize overtime labor in order to meet deadlines. While some use of overtime is unavoidable in manufacturing, it also leads to increased labor costs, especially if labor schedules aren’t optimized to distribute employees’ hours equitably.
In addition to facing higher costs, plants that regularly use overtime production tend to be less productive per hour. According to a manufacturing report from the International Labour Office, a 10% increase in overtime can result in a 2.4% decrease in output per hour. Making a concerted effort to keep production during regularly scheduled hours can help keep costs down and efficiency up throughout the plant. An employee engagement survey from Kronos Incorporated indicates that employee burnout from too much overtime work is responsible for up to 50% of businesses’ annual turnover.
Supply Chain
If your site can’t efficiently adapt to schedule disruptions and wants to avoid utilizing overtime, it may ultimately lead to backorders and out-of-stock products. When production runs behind, it often results in missed deadlines throughout the rest of the supply chain, such as scheduled product shipments with logistics partners. Failing to fulfill these demands is not only a frustration to vendors and customers; it’s also missed revenue for the company, both immediately and potentially long-term if consumers find suitable alternatives.
Maintenance
It is not uncommon for plants to utilize time allocated for preventative maintenance or special projects to offset the impact of production delays. While these compromises might help the facility meet the proposed deadline, they could come at a significant long-term cost and create future disruptions. Overlooking necessary maintenance increases the odds of equipment failure requiring a lengthy repair or unnecessary capital expenditures on a replacement. Delaying special process improvement projects limit the plant’s ability to realize its capacity potential. At minimum, these maintenance or improvement tasks will need to be squeezed into sub-optimal timeframes that will impact normal operation.
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Without an advanced planning and scheduling tool, plants are left reacting to changing site conditions with last-minute, unoptimized schedule changes that can result in these troubling issues felt across the site. VirtECS is a unique planning and scheduling solution that solves many of these challenges for clients in a range of industries. VirtECS will not only suggest the best schedule based on your plant’s individual constraints, but it can also handle sudden schedule changes and account for subsequent adjustments that will need to be made throughout the production process.
As a finite scheduler at one of our biopharmaceutical clients put it, “VirtECS handles all of the ripple effects to the schedule when things change. It is a big time savings in a complicated process with lots of constraints.” If you’re interested in learning more about how VirtECS can improve your planning and scheduling processes, download our short overview guide to find out about the many benefits of implementing the tool at your plant.
by Kelsey H | Jan 16, 2024 | Planning & Scheduling
AspenTech and VirtECS are two of pharmaceutical manufacturers’ most well-known choices for process modeling, analysis, and planning & scheduling software providers. For plants looking to optimize their production schedules and improve their overall output, both tools can offer compelling benefits. However, despite their similarities, each tool is better suited to match different manufacturing needs and priorities within the biopharma industry. Keep reading to find out the biggest differences and advantages of each tool as you decide if AspenTech or VirtECS is right for your organization.
Planning & Scheduling
In terms of manufacturing planning and scheduling, AspenTech and VirtECS offer similar core capabilities. Both tools can build a workable plant schedule based on unique input, and they both offer a means of publishing that schedule across the site through their Aspen Schedule Explorer and VirtECS Symphony products. AspenTech and VirtECS are also both well-equipped to support sales and operations planning (S&OP) initiatives by accounting for costs and market conditions in their planning and scheduling recommendations. They offer similar integration abilities, as well, as they both link to MES systems, allowing sites to receive real-time updates on scheduling execution.
However, one major advantage VirtECS offers is a foundation in a unique, proprietary math programming technology developed by experienced, expert engineers. AspenTech still uses traditional methods of solving scheduling-based math problems, which limits the scope of its solutions. VirtECS technology provides a bird’s eye view of production with an extensive degree of detail. It can account for extremely complex plant constraints, which allows VirtECS to solve advanced scheduling problems at real-world scale. With such a detailed, clear view of the plant’s specifications, VirtECS can also analyze a tremendous number of possible scheduling arrangements and quickly pick the best available option, which enables sites to maximize their throughput.
VirtECS also offers the unique benefit of continually re-optimizing its schedule based on current conditions. With VirtECS’ human-in-the-loop capabilities, the software can account for real-time disruptions and circumstances. Then, within minutes, VirtECS will automatically adjust the rest of the schedule to account for the impact of the changes while maintaining optimal throughput. Similarly, VirtECS users can also choose to override the automated schedule based on their human knowledge of the plant, and the tool’s algorithm will adapt accordingly in the future. AspenTech’s traditional technology cannot offer this advanced capability.
Process Modeling & Analysis
VirtECS’ unique technology also provides advantages in process modeling at manufacturing plants. The tool’s ability to handle complex constraints and details eliminates the need to scale down its plant model to complete its analysis in a reasonable amount of time. Because AspenTech is not able to manage input with the same level of detail, it’s forced to make compromises when developing its plant model to avoid lengthy delays. More traditional approaches to solving schedules, including the methods used to build AspenTech, are better suited to more simple manufacturing processes or situations that don’t require a fast solution.
Even with the heightened detail added to its models, VirtECS is able to complete its analysis and identify optimized scheduling solutions faster than its competitors, including AspenTech. During a BioProcess International Conference keynote speech, Jon Forstrom, Director of Manufacturing Science and Technology at Sanofi, said the faster processing times were a major factor in selecting VirtECS as their process modeling solution. Forstrom said, “We had a challenging test case that we gave modeling vendors, and well-known software providers would either say ‘Sorry, we can’t do what you’re asking,’ or ‘Yes, we can run a one-year manufacturing scenario, but it’s probably going to take a day to complete.’ That’s not very smart or agile. VirtECS can do the same model in thirty seconds now.”
Process Templates
Both AspenTech and VirtECS do offer process templates within their plant models. However, AspenTech’s templates are designed to simply help users input their data more efficiently. VirtECS process templates go a step beyond faster importing. These templates serve to support unique site constraints and additional solver engineering. VirtECS customers regularly cite the tool’s ability to manage their highly specific, complicated site constraints as one of its greatest strengths. In fact, past clients have noted that AspenTech and other similar modeling programs were unable to account for their complex constraints with the prevision they needed, leading them to seek a more customizable solution in VirtECS.
If your site is experiencing similar issues finding a modeling, planning, and scheduling tool that can manage complicated constraints while still efficiently providing solutions, you may find more success using a proprietary software like VirtECS. For more information about VirtECS’ unique approach and benefits specifically within its process modeling and analysis product, download a short guide here.
by Kelsey H | Dec 12, 2023 | Planning & Scheduling
To keep up with the rapid rate of innovation in the global manufacturing industry, a growing number of companies are turning to smart manufacturing with advanced planning and scheduling programs. According to Gartner, nearly 80% of manufacturers are currently investing in their plants’ digital transformations to keep up with changes in the market.
The digital ecosystems these businesses are investing in rely on a complex network of technologies. To implement, maintain, and integrate new planning & scheduling programs with existing tools, your IT department will be one of your most important resources. In many of the organizations we work with, the IT team is instrumental in both selecting the best tools to implement and keeping all technology systems up and running.
As your business considers which digital investments you’ll make in the coming year and beyond, there are several areas where you’ll want to consult IT for their input. Keep reading to discover IT’s role in manufacturing planning and scheduling, as well as the features they’ll appreciate the most when you select a new tool.
Integrating New Tools with Existing Programs
When evaluating and selecting a planning and scheduling software solution (or any manufacturing software solution, for that matter), your IT team will likely advise you to select programs that interact and integrate with each other. There are several reasons your site will find this beneficial. Using integrated tools not only makes it easier for IT to manage your technology systems, but it also makes your entire site more efficient. Using technologies that connect and communicate removes data siloes within the site, making critical information more accessible across departments and providing possibilities to identify plant improvements.
VirtECS, our advanced planning and scheduling solution, offers several features that make it easier for your IT team to integrate the tool into your existing system. Our customers have successfully and seamlessly completed several third-party integrations with OSI Pi, SAP, and other manufacturing technologies. With our decades of experience implementing VirtECS into manufacturing environments, our experts can also provide proven recommendations on how to best build an intuitive system architecture. Plus, if your IT team is busy with other site projects, our team can implement VirtECS into your plant ourselves, or simply offer additional support as needed.
Finding Scalable Solutions
When working with our customers, we’ve often observed that when one manufacturing site finds an effective tool, the business will want to quickly implement the same program at their other plants to reap the most value. For that reason, your IT department may be looking for software that can be easily scaled across the company. Utilizing scalable tools simplifies many aspects of your company’s technology framework by reducing costs associated with the tool, streamlining training and communication, and making it easier for the business to grow.
If your company is looking for scalable software, highly customized solutions can be too time-consuming to be practical for the IT team. A tool like VirtECS can provide all the planning and scheduling features you’ll need under one platform, so IT won’t need to build a custom system themselves or adapt other technology to fit your industry. In addition, our VirtECS experts can provide training to your planning and scheduling team, so IT leaders won’t need to use their valuable time becoming experts on the tool and training staff themselves.
Ensuring Systems Are Secure
One of IT’s biggest priorities and concerns is protecting your business’ confidential information. For any software you add to your manufacturing plant, it will be crucial to ensure that it does not pose cybersecurity risks. If the planning and scheduling tool you select opens your organization up to cyberattacks, IT will need to add security barriers to the software and initiate backups to prevent losing valuable data. The manufacturing industry experiences more cyberattacks than any other industry, and such invasions can cause costly delays and revenue loss.
To ease IT’s security concerns, VirtECS offers a self-hosted software option to limit the risks often associated with a cloud-based solution. Our self-hosted option allows your organization to retain complete control over the data contained in VirtECS, which minimizes hackers’ ability to access your information. This feature has helped VirtECS become a trusted tool for customers even in industries with strict data privacy regulations, such as healthcare and biotechnology.
Adding New Capabilities
As market conditions and industry trends continue to fluctuate, your manufacturing plant may find that your planning and scheduling software needs updating to reflect these changes. In these situations, your IT department will be incredibly helpful in installing software updates, revising the software’s framework to mirror changes in your plant, or coordinating with your software provider to request additional capabilities.
After working with manufacturing businesses for decades, our team is used to making adjustments to VirtECS as the industry advances and technologies change. Some experts refer to this process as “change management,” which simply means creating a manufacturing environment that can effectively respond to change while maintaining optimized operations. One of VirtECS’ best features is that our planning and scheduling system is based on a model of each unique plant, which can be quickly and continually changed to reflect new scenarios or test possible improvements. Our experts can train your team on how to use the VirtECS plant model to facilitate change management and provide expertise on best practices keep processes optimized while responding to change. If you’re interested in learning more about how VirtECS can help your IT team to improve planning and scheduling processes without disrupting your site’s current software systems, fill out a short form and one of our experts will reach out to learn more about your site’s unique needs.
by Kelsey H | Nov 14, 2023 | Industry News, Process Improvement
The past several years have brought frequent and abrupt changes in consumer demand. The COVID-19 pandemic brought sudden surges in spending on household necessities and cleaning products, while the subsequent recovery has resulted in pent-up demand for leisure products and services, among other industries.
In these scenarios, when consumer demand for product suddenly increases, their manufacturing plants may have the opportunity to book new, profitable projects. However, all too often, sites can’t determine if they have the necessary capacity available to take on the increase in production. As a result, the plant can’t commit to the project and ultimately misses out on added revenue.
This is a common scenario for many companies today. According to the G.17 Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization report, the US manufacturing industry is averaging just 79.67% capacity utilization in 2023, down more than one percent over last year. The unused capacity represents millions or even billions of dollars in untapped sales for the industry.
Of course, addressing capacity utilization is an incredibly complex issue. Without a tailored and intelligent solution, identifying sites’ true capacity and optimizing utilization is nearly impossible. On the other hand, plants that invest in a digital twin and planning & scheduling tool can quickly identify opportunities to optimize their processes and fit in added capacity without disrupting current demands.
How VirtECS Plant Models Optimize Utilization
Virtual plant models, such as VirtECS, are designed to simulate each site’s unique design and processes to address bottlenecks that limit their capacity. In the process of analyzing the plant layout, VirtECS can determine the exact amount of excess capacity available. When plants are met with surge opportunities, this knowledge is invaluable, and can be the difference between accepting a new project or turning down a potential new source of revenue.
VirtECS can also take capacity utilization a step further with its extensive scenario analysis capabilities. Using its virtual model, VirtECS can rapidly explore the most attractive production scenarios and select the best possible option, even accounting for which product demands are given higher priority. With this analysis, sites can quickly evaluate which production plan results in the fewest bottlenecks and highest total output. Sites can then add in the potential new project and re-run the analysis to determine if the time, effort, and resources it would need to complete production is worthwhile.
Addressing Future Opportunities with Sales & Operations Planning
To prepare in advance for future changes in consumer demand, we’ve seen several clients have success using VirtECS as a sales & operations (S&OP) planning tool. By adding in finite capacity planning on top of the detailed plant model, VirtECS can update its analysis based on market forecasts, as well as your site’s own historical data. Clients that utilized this feature have been able to use their available capacity to make smarter production decisions and maximize output in anticipation of increased market demands.
Once the production schedule is set, sites can also use VirtECS to address the subsequent adjustments the plant will need to make to account for any added capacity. For example, sites can connect VirtECS to their inventory system to improve supply planning, giving the plant insight on the optimal amount of raw material it should keep on hand to meet the coming production needs. In addition, VirtECS can analyze the site’s labor allotment within its virtual model to address whether more employees will need to be added to the shift, or if the distribution of labor can be optimized to cover the additional projects. To learn more about how to use VirtECS for S&OP, check out our recent articles on demand planning and supply planning.
by Kelsey H | Oct 17, 2023 | Planning & Scheduling
Pharmaceutical companies have seen significant growth in revenue since 2020. For these future-thinking companies, it is important to reinvest funds into their facilities to add resources and new capabilities to fuel continued innovation. Currently, Goldman Sachs estimates that the global pharmaceutical industry could see up to $700 billion in acquisitions and investments in the coming years.
In recent months, many of the world’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers announced investments into expanding production or improving their facilities. Denmark-based Novo Nordisk has begun investing $2.3 billion to expand capacity at their plant in Hillerød. Novartis, based out of Switzerland, plans to invest $300 million into operations at several of their European sites to support their push into biologics medicines. In the US, Eli Lilly will spend $450 million to increase production of diabetes medicine in North Carolina, while also adding $1.6 billion to their site in Indiana.
When spending millions or even billions of dollars, even small optimizations can lead to significant financial gains for pharmaceutical manufacturers. Keep reading to discover how digital twin technology can optimize plant expansion investments to add flexibility and increase efficiency.
Optimizing Investment for Flexible Future Circumstances
For most companies, the overarching goal of major capital investments is to increase production to meet consumer demand or add the ability to produce new products. These projects may take years to come to fruition, and as such, they are often subject to change based on market conditions.
To account for variable conditions, the shrewdest investment strategies allow for flexibility within the facility. When investing in a site expansion, the added capacity should be designed to adapt to new processes, technologies, or product portfolios that become a priority in the future. This method allows organizations to pivot quickly to follow changes to consumer demand or adjust to take on production for new medicines without additional added capacity.
With a powerful virtual model, also known as a digital twin, plants can test and evaluate different potential layouts to identify which will provide them with the most flexibility. Because the digital twin is an exact copy of the site’s unique parameters, the planning and scheduling team can digitally add pieces of equipment, production lines, and processes to simulate a real manufacturing run. The tool can then run many simulations at once to, allowing the site to see how flexible the proposed layout may be and ultimately identify the most efficient investment solution.
Using Plant Expansion to Increase Efficiency
In addition to adding flexibility and overall capacity, investments into manufacturing facilities also present an opportunity for companies to increase production efficiency and generally get the most value possible from each investment dollar. As noted in Eli Lilly’s press release announcing their plant expansion, these investments are not only about improving business operations; they are also essential to helping more patients access the medicines they need. Often, achieving that goal comes down to optimizing resource allocation to achieve the best run rate with the added capacity sites.
After more than 30 years in the industry, we’ve found that using a digital twin like VirtECS is the most reliable and effective way to optimize resources. With the data VirtECS collects, the software can quickly analyze past and future manufacturing runs to identify every possible opportunity to maximize output with the given number of equipment and raw material. Sites can test potential changes to each step of the production process to find where additional investment may have the biggest impact, and where the effects could be limited. To learn more about VirtECS’ digital twin capabilities, download our short guide here.
