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Vol 28 - No 01 - February 2002 An Evening with Manugistics About thirty members from London Branch, Thames Valley Branch and the APS Special Interest Group had an enjoyable and educational evening with Manugistics at their UK headquarters in Bracknell on the 4th December 2001. Manugistics are, of course, pioneers and leading suppliers of APS and supply chain management software who have for many years been at the forefront of APS applications development for many industry sectors. Their software has consistently been a leader in the field of APS and has delivered benefits to clients across a number of industry sectors. The evening took the form of an ‘APS mini seminar' starting with a presentation by Dr. Stephen Franks, Vice President, Manufacturing Strategy at Manugistics, followed by a finite scheduling and APS market survey review by Brian Tinham, the Editor of Manufacturing Control Systems, and then an industrial case study from Mars Electronics. Many IOM members do, of course, know Stephen Franks as the long-standing Managing Director of Scheduling Technology Group, the original OPT pioneers, who were recently incorporated within Manugistics, adding their extensive factory scheduling capability to the Manugistics product portfolio. Stephen gave the audience a clear understanding on the application and positioning of APS and how different industry sectors demand different solutions. His background comes very much from the Eli Goldratt school and that was demonstrated by the clear and lucid explanation of the ‘drum, buffer, rope' principles set out by Goldratt a number of years ago. I knew the theory from my own past work but Stephen's closeness to the subject and his obvious enthusiasm added greatly to my own understanding and that of the audience. Stephen introduced us to the VAT model, based on companies' BOM structures, whereby industries can be categorised as V-shaped (few materials convert into many products), A-shaped (many materials convert into few products) and T-shaped (many purchased items are assembled into a range of different products). The talk illustrated how different shapes demand different planning and scheduling solutions and how Manugistics offer different product modules, individually or in conjunction with one another, to meet the needs of different companies and different ‘shapes'. Brian Tinham does, by virtue of his position, have an unrivalled knowledge of the APS market and shared a number of insights with the audience. The worrying realisation was that there is a very low take-up to date of APS and FCS (finite capacity scheduling). In particular only a very small number of respondents in a survey in the UK used finite scheduling techniques across their whole site. Brian's view was that up to 80% of UK sites could benefit from APS/FCS. In particular he quoted from a case study at Ricoh where dramatic savings had been achieved with APS and where the internal attitude was leaning towards a ‘let's use APS for everything' attitude. The evening concluded with the Mars case study presented by Serhat Sonkur, Senior Planning Manager at Mars Electronics. Mars are users of Manugistics APS and have implemented it for factory scheduling and order promising. Mars implemented APS within six months and achieved savings of $ 500,000. They make coin-vending systems and, with the advent of the Euro, manufacturing volumes have doubled this year. There is little doubt that, without APS, such a surge in demand would have been almost impossible to manage. The ‘order promiser' functionality is clearly very impressive and one anecdote referred to a rush order from a large and prestigious customer where a delivery date could be promised in minutes and delivery achieved within two weeks without serious damage to the overall delivery performance of the business. In the past it would have taken two weeks just to respond to the customer followed by a six weeks lead-time for delivery of the additional demand. Bill Seldon from London Branch gave the vote of thanks and the event finished with a very pleasant buffet and a vigorous discussion. The audience then went home, well educated and well fed, each one with a free copy of Eli Goldratt's book "The Goal" as an apt and useful souvenir of a most enjoyable evening. Gunther Kruse, FIOM Page number: 9 Word count: 600 Related Topics: Planning and scheduling Supply chain
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