STEELMAN: Production Planning

Manufacturable sales order inquiries are input from the Order Entry and Product Description modules. This information will be sent to the Production Routing module so as to determine the Production Routing Steps required to fulfill the order. Information from the Production Routing module will be sent to the Capacity Planning Module to determine the processing capacity per Processing Unit that must be allocated for the production of the required quantity of semi-finished product.

The data provided by the Production Routing and the Capacity Planning Module, in addition to the data from the Sales Order Entry and Product Description Modules, is fed as input to the Constraint Based Finite Scheduling Program (CBFSP). This program will execute in three (3) modes:

• backward planning from the specified promise date,
• forward planning to determine earliest promise date, or
• an alternating combination of both above in cases where the order to be fit into the Sales Order Plan (SOP) and/or Production Order Plan (POP) conflicts with previously planned orders or insufficient lead time is available prior to the desired promise date.

The operational rules and equipment constraints as mentioned above, are included in either,

• a data base of numeric values that operational units are not allowed to exceed, for example the minimum tons/tones per order processed through a Processing Unit, or
• as a series of decision (pass/fail) filtering rules established as data.

Accepted order inquiries will be slotted into available time slots in the sequential order of processing through the Processing Units, taking into consideration any process required cooling times in the semi-finished state, e.g., between the Hot Rolling Mill and the Pickling Line. Processing Unit specific campaigns will be respected when searching for unallocated Processing Unit capacity. Where possible, the CBFSP will utilize unallocated semi-finished work-in-process inventory as feed stock to a Processing Unit.

The Sales Order Plan and Production Order Plan will be available to each Processing Unit from on-line terminals with full query and update capability. Raw material input requirements are processed through the MRPII Module.