by Kelsey H | Sep 14, 2023 | Process Improvement
When Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media sites hit the Internet in the 2000s, they completely changed the way people communicated with each other online. In addition, they gave businesses an avenue to gain insights from their audience and provide important news updates instantly.
Creating accessible communication channels has long been a challenge for manufacturing plants. In a busy and complex manufacturing environment, employees are often unable to receive real-time updates through traditional methods like email or word-of-mouth. When a new shift comes in, schedule changes and other important adjustments can get lost in the shuffle.
That’s where a tool like VirtECS Symphony comes in. It’s become known in the industry as “manufacturing social media,” because while sites like Facebook facilitate conversations among the general public, VirtECS Symphony helps plants improve communicate between departments to streamline production across the site. By utilizing this kind of tool, manufacturers can benefit from several key features and facilitate smart manufacturing to improve their site’s operations.
Speed Up the Exchange of Information
One of the first benefits manufacturers often notice immediately with VirtECS Symphony is a faster and smoother exchange of current information to support plants’ smart manufacturing efforts. VirtECS Symphony will publish the current production schedule to employees’ devices and screens across the plant, while also allowing for comments and messages between users. With the VirtECS Symphony platform, everyone on site can stay up to date on schedule changes as soon as they’re published, which results in more accurate production runs. Schedule updates are reflected on VirtECS Symphony in near real-time, and new comments are refreshed automatically to ensure no messages will be missed. In fact, we’ve even heard one of our clients refer to the tool as a “running production meeting,” thanks to its ability to continuously communicate many of the topics typically covered in those meetings.
Improve Coordination Between Groups
Using manufacturing social media, plants can also facilitate communication between groups or departments that may not normally interact. When a user makes a comment on the schedule, any employee located throughout the plant can see the message instantly and adjust as needed. Without a communication platform like VirtECS Symphony, it could take much longer to deliver the updates to every department. Comments and messages can also be viewed across shifts, so the next employees coming in can immediately begin working with the most current information without having to comb through emails or written notes. With increased coordination among every group in the plant, your organization can avoid costly delays and wasted product batches.
Increase Accuracy & Efficiency
Given that your site will have more people who can view and comment on your production schedule, there will also be more opportunities for those people to catch errors or potential improvements. Without manufacturing social media, the production schedule may only be reviewed by the planning and scheduling team. However, if you use VirtECS Symphony to publish the schedule, it will get reviewed by employees from every corner of the plant. Helping more people get eyes on the schedule will make it more likely for someone to catch errors, should a problem arise. Providing a platform to get input from other departments also presents an opportunity for different groups to notice opportunities to lower costs or increase run rate that may not have been identified otherwise.
Provide Transparency and Impact to Employees
Manufacturing social media also provides other benefits in addition to operational efficiency and accuracy. Using VirtECS Symphony and other tools to improve communication can also impact employees’ overall job satisfaction. Giving everyone at the plant access to the production schedule and providing them with an opportunity to share input helps each employee feel like a valuable member of the team. According to a Qualtrics report, employees who are highly engaged in their work are 87% more likely to stay with their current company. If your organization wants to limit turnover and keep employees who produce quality work, it’s essential to help them feel involved.
If you’re interested in learning more about what a manufacturing social media tool like VirtECS Symphony can do to benefit your plant, download our short guide for more details.
by Kelsey H | Aug 15, 2023 | Planning & Scheduling
VirtECS and SchedulePro from Intelligen are two of the leading providers of planning, scheduling, and modeling services. These advanced tools address similar challenges that many manufacturers face in optimizing their processes and maximizing output.
However, VirtECS and SchedulePro are founded in distinctly different forms of technology. As a result, they offer several different features and benefits. To help your organization decide which tool may best suit your facility’s planning, scheduling, and modeling needs, we’re breaking down the biggest differences between VirtECS and SchedulePro.
Planning & Scheduling
At their core, VirtECS and SchedulePro are both manufacturing planning and scheduling programs, which means they can perform the same basic actions. Both offer the ability to schedule production activities, update the activity status, and publish the finished schedule to a webpage. They can also generate a sequential recipe of steps needed to complete a product batch.
However, there are several features that enhance the planning and scheduling process that only VirtECS can provide. For example, VirtECS offers the option to include maintenance activities in the schedule, which helps coordinate regular production activities around necessary downtime to prevent equipment breakdowns. With VirtECS, plants can also include their product changeover activities, optimize their solution prep scheduling, and account for level-loading of solutions preps within the schedule. These additional features help VirtECS create a more comprehensive schedule for the entire plant, which makes it an especially attractive option for plants in the highly complex pharmaceutical industry.
Modeling & Analysis
VirtECS and SchedulePro are both powerful tools when it comes to their modeling and analysis capabilities. Both programs will create a virtual model of your plant and quantitively evaluate its production performance to identify areas of improvement. They provide stochastic modeling, variability analysis, and can generate reports based on their findings.
The greatest difference in the modeling and analysis capabilities of the two tools comes down to the technology powering them. SchedulePro is run with discrete event simulation, while VirtECS utilizes math programming technology. To understand the difference between the two, consider a scenario where you’re running a path through a maze. SchedulePro’s technology will give you a first-person viewpoint as you work through the maze, while VirtECS will give you an overhead view of the entire maze at once. You can find out more about the unique advantages of math programming and pitfalls of discrete event simulation in our in-depth article.
Constraints
One major drawback of the discrete event simulation framework is that it can be difficult to include all the constraints present in a manufacturing environment. SchedulePro is able to incorporate basic constraints, such as equipment and product resource requirements, but with its sequence-based foundation, it struggles to accommodate particularly specific constraints that pharmaceutical facilities often experience.
This is an area where VirtECS excels. Math programming is a constraint-based approach to scheduling and can account for nearly any constraint your facility may have. As a result, the schedules VirtECS produces are more likely to be accurate because they include all the elements that affect production. VirtECS pharmaceutical clients often include constraints like clean/dirty hold times, material expirations, and upstream train selection.
Flexibility
In addition to missing key constraints, discrete event simulators like SchedulePro typically become very complex very quickly, and their setup can make it difficult to modify or change anything in the schedule. With each production activity you add, the timeline of events gets more complicated and bogged down, which makes accounting for flexibility or changes challenging.
On the other hand, the VirtECS framework is incredibly flexible. It allows for manual overrides, which plants will need anytime there’s an equipment breakdown or error. Once those changes are made, VirtECS can then automatically reoptimize and reschedule the subsequent processes to minimize the disruption to total output. In addition, VirtECS can track mass balances, schedule based on need, and provide real-time updates to the in-house production team.
Continuous Learning
In an industry like pharmaceutical manufacturing, new innovations are introduced constantly, and planning and scheduling tools must keep abreast of these changes to continue providing services that meet plants’ current needs. As of the publication of this article, SchedulePro has not been updated since 2019, which means it is missing years of developments and advances that have altered the way pharmaceuticals are created in many plants. Perhaps most notably, they’re missing updates based on the major changes made during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the need to look for unforeseen constraints and supply chain delays.
The team at Advanced Process Combinatorics, Inc. is committed to regularly releasing new versions of VirtECS. One major advantage of VirtECS is that it aggregates data from each schedule it produces, which means insights it learns from optimizing one plant will be used to improve scheduling at every facility that uses VirtECS. This includes manufacturers that use VirtECS outside of the pharmaceutical industry. In this way, plants using VirtECS can benefit from data it wouldn’t have access to otherwise.
In addition, VirtECS offers integrations with other programs frequently used in manufacturing facilities, such as MES and ERP software. When these systems can all communicate, it minimizes the need for data entry and ensures each program is working from the most current information.
If your pharmaceutical manufacturing plant is looking for a flexible approach to planning, scheduling, or modeling that can account for all production constraints, you’ll want to consider implementing VirtECS in your facility. To learn more about VirtECS’ unique approach to optimizing pharmaceutical plants, download our short guide here.
by Kelsey H | Jul 11, 2023 | Planning & Scheduling
With many factors to account for and an extensive number of events to sequence, planning and scheduling for pharmaceutical sites is incredibly complicated to execute. This complexity has made way for multiple planning and scheduling software systems to hit the market over the years in order to help plants manage their operations. These systems use a variety of different technical philosophies to generate production plans for your plant. Two of the most common approaches are discrete event simulation and math programming, which we’ll discuss more in depth in this article.
What Is Discrete Event Simulation?
Discrete event simulation is an older and very common technology that software providers like SchedulePro use to create a manufacturing schedule. In fact, the software you currently use for planning and scheduling may be run with this type of approach. In discrete event simulation, every action involved in the manufacturing process is assigned a particular time stamp to create a chronological sequence. The software can then run simulated events through the sequence to observe and record predictions under different circumstances to help the site identify its schedule.
There are some advantages to building a schedule with this method. When every action, component, and constraint is included in the model, it can produce accurate results. It also supports running simulations under many different conditions, such as with different amounts of raw material on hand, which can offer helpful insights. However, discrete event simulation also comes with some significant disadvantages that are difficult to overcome.
Drawbacks of Discrete Event Simulation
At every point in generating a production schedule, there are an incredible number of decisions that must be made. To generate a potential schedule, discrete event simulators will follow one set of decisions at a time, using rules of thumb to dictate each decision. Unfortunately, the rules of thumb don’t apply to every situation, so simulators require a lot of attention and maintenance from programmers to remain functional. Similarly, discrete event simulators also typically offer features that are standard across many industries, which means the software may not be tailored to the specific problems pharmaceutical manufacturers experience. As a result, the insights the tool produces may not address the real bottlenecks the plant is facing or may require substantial effort from the end user to keep them working.
Additionally, the sequencing nature of discrete event simulation means that the backend of the program can become extremely complex very quickly. For pharmaceutical plants in particular, the many processes and moving parts of their systems often result in a tool that is very convoluted and can only be managed by one or two expert users. This can be a problem because the tool becomes slower and more difficult to use. If the tool isn’t user-friendly, adding updates whenever the plant model changes becomes very time-consuming.
The complexity of discrete event simulation becomes especially challenging when manufacturers need to add in a new constraint to the system. Because of the time, resources, and processing power it takes to update the model, many manufacturers choose not to make updates regularly. However, if the tool doesn’t account for all current constraints, such as hold times or material expirations, the schedule it produces is less likely to be accurate and more likely to result in errors, delays, and less output.
How Math Programming Adds Flexibility & Accuracy
One alternative to scheduling with discrete event simulation is math programming technology. Math programming is a more contemporary solution than simulation technologies, as it offers the ability to move back and forth in time to find the best combination of decisions based on your plant’s constraints. Most companies avoided powering their scheduling software with mathematical programming because the equations needed to build the tool require advanced expertise. Additionally, they struggle some struggle to overcome the computational cost of formulating and solving the complex math equations that generate the optimized schedules. However, if a piece of software can overcome those barriers, it will provide much more flexibility within the model, identify more opportunities for optimization, and require less effort from the end user.
Our team at APCI has spent the last three decades developing VirtECS, our planning and scheduling tool with a math programming framework. VirtECS is built on highly sophisticated algorithms written by our PhD engineers and specifically designed to model real-world manufacturing processes. Our tool overcomes the barriers associated with developing the equations because it understands and models the process physics of real manufacturing plants, and it incorporates additional data gathered from ERP systems, MES, and process historians. It also uses augmented intelligence to continuously improve the program and advance its scheduling capabilities.
As a result, the VirtECS interface can be updated much more quickly when plants need to add new constraints, products, or equipment to their model. It can also handle more specific constraints than many of our competitors, such as upstream train selection, maintenance schedules, and product changeover activities. With a more detailed model, VirtECS can provide insights on how plants can account for uncertainty and variability to create the most optimized and accurate production schedule. If you’re interested in learning how VirtECS can transform modeling, planning and scheduling for your manufacturing site, sign up for a short introductory call with one of our experts so we can learn more about your unique needs.
by Kelsey H | Jun 13, 2023 | Industry News, Process Improvement
For manufacturing organizations, gathering, organizing, and analyzing all the available data about their internal processes is important for many reasons. However, elite companies that want to gain deeper knowledge and implement the most successful strategies have started to look beyond internal data.
Recent reports signal that an increasing number of companies are engaging in external data sharing. According to a recent BCG global survey, nearly 75% of manufacturing managers are considering using external data sharing to improve their operations. In this article, we’ll explain what external data sharing is, the benefits it offers to manufacturers, and some ways to incorporate data sharing into your organization’s processes while still protecting your valuable IP data.
What Is Data Sharing?
Essentially, when businesses engage in external data sharing, it means they join with companies in similar industries or markets to exchange their anonymized data in a protected ecosystem. The goal of data sharing is for each organization to identify trends that could unlock new opportunities for optimization and improvements. Research from McKinsey has shown that external data sharing has become one of the best ways for businesses to improve their existing processes, enter new markets, or develop new competitive advantages.
Though data sharing does require companies to share some of their success with potential competitors, it’s still firmly a worthwhile practice for manufacturers in terms of generating revenue and growth. According to Gartner, organizations that share data externally generate three times more measurable economic benefit than those who do not.
What Are the Risks of External Data Sharing?
While external data sharing offers many strategic benefits, it does also require a high degree of trust between organizations and an extremely secure data sharing network. For many manufacturers, this can be a major barrier to starting a data sharing program. Analysis from Gartner has shown that less than 5% of data sharing programs in 2022 could locate reputable data sources and distinguish between real and falsified data.
Given the current state of cybersecurity, manufacturers can’t afford to make themselves vulnerable to security risks. According to data from Statista, manufacturers were the target of nearly 25% of all cyberattacks worldwide in 2022, the largest share of any industry. In addition to increased exposure to a cyberattack, if businesses are unable to verify the source of data, they may waste time and resources working with fabricated information that won’t bring them true insights or value.
Even when manufacturers can confirm the data comes from trusted sources, they often face other hurdles that make external data sharing more complex in practice than in theory. For example, companies may face issues with interoperability that make it hard to translate the data between different organizations’ systems. With these challenges, manufacturers may find external data sharing difficult to execute, even if they have a strong desire to gain its benefits.
How VirtECS is Built on Secure Data Sharing
For many companies, identifying more opportunities for optimization is one of the primary forces driving their interest in external data sharing – and for good reason. A recent BCG survey revealed that data sharing can unlock billions of dollars in value through optimization alone.
APCI has been developing and perfecting methods to optimize manufacturing processes for more than three decades. We learned long ago through the course of our work that utilizing a larger volume of advanced data will better inform scheduling strategies for all of our customers. That’s why we built our planning, scheduling, and optimization tool, VirtECS, to gather secure knowledge that allows us to continually improve the VirtECS algorithm.
This algorithm drives VirtECS by following each unique plant’s exact model, constraints, and circumstances to find the most optimized schedule possible. The program draws on data from our team’s 30+ years of experience working with manufacturers, allowing us to pool knowledge from a wide range of projects and applications. As APCI has grown into new markets and taken on more projects over the years, VirtECS has continued to learn more and grow stronger for new customers and longtime clients alike. Every time VirtECS is implemented in a new setting, the tool gains access to new information and generates better scheduling recommendations that improve efficiency or create more value.
Over the years, we’ve found that data from one industry can still apply to others. We’ve applied VirtECS to several different industries and use data from each of them to make improvements to the tool, giving our clients access to insights they might not discover otherwise. VirtECS isn’t a repository for our clients’ data, but rather a source of all the lessons learned from that data gathered over many years.
If you’re interested in learning more about how VirtECS can help optimize your production schedule, download our short guide here.
by Kelsey H | May 9, 2023 | Planning & Scheduling, Process Improvement
Despite the interconnected nature of the modern business world, many manufacturing companies still treat their production sites as individual, separate entities. These facilities are often located offsite from the company’s headquarters and tend to focus on their specific production duties, rather than the business’ broader strategies. As a result, these sites can end up disconnected from each other, with each plant using its own operations procedures, software systems and tools.
While giving plants the autonomy to make their own decisions might seem like the most efficient strategy, having a different system at each site can create siloed data and a lack of coordination across the entire organization. This frequently leads to errors in data reporting, forecasting and decision-making, as well as more labor required to sort through information from each site’s software. According to research from IDC, companies lose a significant amount of revenue each year due to inefficiencies from siloed business systems.
Breaking down data silos and increasing coordination among plants can help resolve many of these pain points. By implementing one software system across all manufacturing sites, businesses can improve their efficiency and decision-making as a whole.
More Powerful Data Set
When a company’s manufacturing plants all use the same software tools, it makes it much easier to compile and analyze the data generated by these sites’ production processes. Instead of sorting through multiple sets of data organized in all different ways, business leaders can use one tool’s powerful algorithm to quickly sort and analyze all of the information available at once. With a higher volume of data to access, the tool will be able to identify more opportunities for process improvements at each site. Even if the sites work on different products or perform different functions, data related to production efficiency can still provide relevant insights that every plant can benefit from.
Sharing Data Between Sites
On a similar note, easier access to mass data can also help plants share strategies and implement successful tactics more quickly. For example, if one site finds a base schedule that optimizes their material usage or minimizes downtime, other similar sites can access the published schedule and immediately start aligning their operations. If plants use competing programs, it can be difficult to translate the data and insights between them. Collaborating and sharing information about how to be as efficient as possible will help the entire business produce a higher output and generate more profits.
Smarter Decision-Making
The benefits to more accurate and accessible data aren’t limited to the plant level. With an interconnected system of software and data, company decision makers can also make more informed investments into their manufacturing processes. For example, a company may be considering adding capacity to one of their sites to increase production of a high-demand product. If they can access a virtual model of each site within one shared tool, they’ll be able to test and compare the impact of added capacity at every plant. Alternatively, shared resources can also be helpful in more urgent situations. When one plant experiences an unexpected delay, manufacturing leaders can identify available capacity at other sites with the necessary equipment and materials on hand to complete the production run. This information will help decision makers find the best potential return on their investment or make the most strategic choice for the business.
Integration Between Programs and Plants
To generate even greater insights, manufacturing businesses should strive to select software and programs that can connect and share data to other platforms. More data – and particularly more non-siloed data – will only give the business more opportunity for optimization and efficiency. Sharing data between programs can help the sites gain a deeper analysis of plant operations, understand the relationships between manufacturing functions, and better communicate important insights between departments.
Over the past 30 years, we’ve used our planning and scheduling tool, VirtECS, to generate optimized results for some of the most complex manufacturers in the world. Many of our client relationships started with just one project at one site, but after seeing how much value VirtECS could generate, they quickly decided to implement the tool at their other plants as well. In the past, we’ve connected VirtECS to many of our clients’ other programs, such as forecasting and ERP systems, to allow for end-to-end data sharing and optimization. To learn about our journey implementing VirtECS into several sites for one of our specialty chemical clients, you can read more in our case study.
