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SPS - SalesPlanner
The sales planning works typically on a time horizon of 3 to 12 month. Its input is a mixture of accepted orders, order inquiries and order forecasts. For this market demand, the sales planning will have to produce a sales plan: this sales plan will reserve production capacity on all major production units for all or for a selected part of the demand. The sales plan must fit the plant capacity limits as defined in the plant calendar.
To be able to maximize the sales profit, all cost factors (production cost, material unit cost, sales price) have to be made available to the objective function that will optimize the profit. Apart from the sales plan (production capacity slots), the sales planning will also provide the sales department the list of selected order inquiries and the list of rejected inquiries. If capacity is left, based on the forecasts, the spare capacity will be assigned to forecast orders.
With this sales plan, the sales department can organize an efficient daily order entry process. The entered orders will have to be assigned ("netted") against the capacity reservations of the actual sales plan. As a result of this order netting against reserved capacity, the delivery date for this new entered order can be extracted immediately from the sales plan (ATP/CTP). Also during the order negotiation process, some capacity reservations for product types can be exchanged against others. If major changes are required, a new optimization will be needed.
This project will allow us to handle larger volumes of slabs with less manual workload and higher quality on the existing slab yard areas. We are convinced that it will succeed and that we can reduce the number of employees and still be better and handle larger volumes. We seek to achieve more efficient usage of our limited space for slabs and minimize crane/slabs movement.
