The brand new app for intelligent manufacturing planning is here.

"Our digital twins of the machines should actually be able to plan their own orders." After the technical director of one of our corporate clients said this in a smart factory meeting, the idea stuck with us. A short time later, the first prototype of a fully automated production control system was deployed. Now we're offering a completely redesigned app that also takes into account the availability of all resources and necessary equipment.

Here are the differences to conventional planning systems, such as those you know today from ERP or MES:

• Control panels in ERP or MES systems are optimized for manual intervention. Our app is based on rules that take your individual requirements into account. Everything else runs automatically, without any manual intervention. Changes to the schedule are implemented automatically by the digital twins of the machines. This saves your production planners a significant amount of time, allowing them to focus on optimizing production processes.

• The app does not rely on work plans and bills of materials from ERP or MES systems. It works with its own self-learning process designs (input-process-output) that include all the details relevant for production planning. Your planning will therefore finally be based on realistic information.

• The Smart Factory platform, the core of IndustryView SF, views ERP production orders more as requirements (item, quantity, and deadline) and uses them to create production orders that take production logic into account. This includes, for example, grouping call-off items into production lots. The inaccuracies of ERP and MES systems are a thing of the past, and planning is based on actual production processes.

• Version 1 was largely based on internal code, which we have completely replaced in the new app with workflow algorithms that you can customize yourself using the integrated workflow designer. As always, we are happy to support you in implementing your own ideas and requirements.

• There are "ports" where you can "plug in" your own algorithm components to, for example, cover the specific rules of certain manufacturing families. This ensures that the planning also works for exceptions and unusual processes.

• The app basically schedules tasks according to "natural" rules. The general principle is: the most urgent tasks first. And: use available capacity immediately. But you can change this if you have different priorities.

• Because it integrates real-world machine data, the app is aware of every disruption that causes delays, but also of every efficiency improvement. Process speed thus forms the basis for scheduling. The planning algorithm runs continuously; there is no such thing as a "restart." The control center therefore adapts to reality at all times.

• Both series and one-off production are optimally planned. While in one-off production the production units move together through the plant, in series production they are "containers" that are transferred from station to station. Our screenshot (below) shows an example. Therefore, it will no longer happen that individual containers are forgotten and the machine has to be set up multiple times.

It goes without saying that the entire planning process is fully automated. The same applies to the up-to-dateness of the information on which the whole thing is naturally based.

The fact that production planners are completely relieved of routine tasks such as the tedious "shuffling" of orders when changes occur is a major advantage. They can concentrate on optimizing the rules that the digital twins use to govern the behavior of the automated planning process.