Your customers are becoming more demanding, competition is getting more intense, and it's becoming more and more difficult to access information you need to effectively manage your business.

Monitoring

Most companies monitor their business activity, but it's often after the fact—too late to head off a problem such as a missed bid deadline or the loss of a major customer.

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) provides more accurate information about the status and results of various operations, processes, and transactions so you can make better decisions, more quickly address problem areas, and reposition your organization to take full advantage of emerging opportunities.

For instance, management may be interested in slicing and dicing product profitability information to decide whether to discontinue a line or expand a product. Operational personnel may be interested in keeping an eye on key performance/process indicators. Alternatively the objective may be to monitor defects for the company across plants, shifts,or lines. These are just many of the ways in which activity monitoring can be used effectively.

click here to see an example of defect monitoring.

Production Planning

Operational systems and costing solutions typically contain bill of activity (machine and labor) information to produce components or final products necessary for the production planning process. Combining this information with recipe and other bill of material requirements to meet production levels, a model may be constructed to produce material, machine and labor requirement summaries for a given level of production. The indicated level of production is typically driven by product demand from purchase orders or even forecasted sales volumes. Our solutions (using OLAP tools) have incredible modeling capability and facilitate the fast deployment of production planning models, customized for the client.

The planned production drives the plan in terms of materials and other resources necessary to meet the level of planned production. Material requirements are typically driven from a final product and recipe composition for materials. Storing the BOMs in the model, the production plan and other planning models can be compared instantaneously with multi-scenario modeling capability. The material purchase prices are used to calculate the production output cost for materials.

Additional to the direct materials required, plant and human resource consumptions are also calculated. Similar to the BOMs per product are the activity compositions (BOAs) per product and related recipes. This entails the inclusion of machine and crewing requirements. Actual labor rates per grade are used for labor cost calculations.

click here for an example of production planning.