STEELMAN: Capacity Planning

The purpose of the Capacity Planning Module of STEELMAN is to determine the necessary amount of processing time required on each subsequent Processing Unit defined in the Production Routing Module, in order to transform the semi-finished input feed stock into semi-finished or finished product with the desired attributes to fulfill orders.

Based on the product routing and the characteristics of the material to be produced out of a Processing Unit, the input material consumption factor at the unit will be determined from the product/Processing Unit consumption data base. In addition, special difficult to manufacture products requiring extra buffer material as a contingency against down stream processing errors are taken into consideration at this point of the production planning process. The amount of input material required at a Processing Unit will be considered as the amount of output material produced at the previous up stream Processing Unit or as the amount of feed stock to be drawn out of the unallocated work-in-process inventory.

The Processing Unit processing time for the production of the output semi-finished or finished product is to be calculated based on the average throughput rate in tons/tones/hour for the particular product being processed. This data is supplied by the company as part of the Processing Unit Capability data requirements of the Production Routing Module. The time, so determined, will be evaluated against any equipment loading constraints and/or limitations to establish, for example;

• if the order is too large to process all at once and must therefore be broken into smaller processing lot sizes, so as to fit within the Processing Unit campaign restrictions, or
• the order is too small and cannot be scheduled as specified.

A number of 'constraint based rules' are utilized in this module in order to reflect the operating personality of the steel manufacturing facility. This demand for Processing Unit processing capacity is fed into the Constraint Based Finite Scheduler Program (CBFSP) of the Production Planning Module in order to determine when the capacity will be available to be allocated against this order.

The CBFSP will determine for each Processing Unit defined in the Production Routing Module;

• the latest start by time,
• the earliest start by time, and
• the latest finish by processing time