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Material Flow Coordinator
MFC is a management and optimization tool that integrates the short-term production order scheduling with medium/long term capacity planning. It allows both scheduling and planning levels to negotiate production volumes and material flows in order to find a global solution. When generating such a solution, MFC balances customer satisfaction, material flow restrictions, inventory planning (safety stocks) and schedule quality.
MFC is aimed at improving customer service (due date performance, lead times and flexibility), increasing production (throughput, material flows), controlling inventory (stock levels and product mix) and, importantly, complying with the plant capacity plan. The MFC's strong link with detailed scheduling and campaign planning enables the model to produce a capacity plan that proves to be highly compliant with the real production.
The negotiator of the Material Flow Coordinator analyzes actual production plan against global production goals (target production volumes and production order due dates) and harmonize new flow constraints for each line. The planning strategy is coordinated by the strategy module (Scheduling Strategy) within Material Flow Coordinator. In doing so, scheduling strategies ranging from a pure push to a pure pull can be selected. Individual detailed scheduling steps can be performed on different computers or CPU's. This explicit form of parallelism guarantees the performance of the Material Flow Coordinator negotiation model.
We decided to continue the implementation of the AIS SteelPlanner modules in Ternium Sidor's cold lines because of two main reasons: The excellent results that we have achieved with the Hot End Solution project and the flexibility on the configuration of the solutions of AIS.
