Plant Simulation Shop Library

Plant Simulation Shop provides an application object library that you can use to model, simulate, visualize and optimize a production system on an object oriented basis. By modeling the workshop principles of your production system, you define how production orders are forwarded through production and how you can control the material flow of your production system to improve its daily performance. Two kinds of users are able to take advantage of Plant Simulation Shop

• Engineers can leverage Plant Simulation Shop’s material requirements planning capabilities to create a production plan that is used to schedule customer orders

• Your preparation staff and managing clerks can use Plant Simulation Shop to optimize the production plan on a daily operational basis

Establishing a production plan

Plant Simulation Shop’s material requirements planning capabilities enable you to break down the bill of materials and establish production lots for individual components and products.These capabilities allow you to create a forecast of assumed demand that, in turn, will become the basis for your system’s production plan. At this point, you can set up customer orders against the production plan. If real world conditions arise where actual customer orders exceed your plan orders, you can use Plant Simulation Shop to start your rush orders. Plant Simulation Shop enables you to establish a forecast table where you can organize your products into appropriate product groups that you manage and monitor.These product groups are exploded into a material requirements plan. You can manage your production orders with respect to their lot size by generating production orders from the material requirements plan. Stock from production orders that are too big will be offset against later plan orders.There will be no production orders during the planning phase for lot sizes managed in accordance with the Kanban rule. Instead, these lots will be handled through simulation runs. You can use Plant Simulation Shop for scheduling purposes by displaying single plant orders in easy to understand Gantt charts. Plant Simulation Shop uses the rules of production control to manage multiple orders that start at the same time and to decide which order starts first.You can use these controls to process the product order list in sequence, establish individual priorities manually, consider the due dates of individual orders, or use randomized priorities. Plant Simulation Shop’s support for the rules of production control and process sequencing enable you to account for a variety of factors such as first suitable, longest/shortest waiting time, longest/shortest operation time, longest/shortest completion time and time of delivery – along with other order-related variables. In addition, you can use Plant Simulation Shop to analyze and calculate production and product costs. When you use Plant Simulation Shop to apply cost calculations to a specific cost center, you define the cost per hour and price for an external product in the system’s master data table.

Optimizing your production plan 

Once you understand the particulars that apply to a given customer order, you can use Plant Simulation Shop to create a production plan, whose feasibility you can subsequently check and validate from a realworld perspective. During this optimization process, you can use Plant Simulation Shop to optimize your production planning and control parameters. More specifically, you can:

• Supplement your existing PPS (enterprise resource planning/manufacturing resource planning) systems to optimize their system parameters

 • Perform realistic feasibility checks on your production plan

 • Evaluate diverse business and manufacturing scenarios

 • Precisely plan given task profiles by utilizing current factory-specific operational data