Increase Your Factory Output with Asprova APS.

Synchronize Your Processes with Asprova’s Advanced Planning and Scheduling System

Many manufacturing companies have complex production processes, involving sequential, parallel, converging, and branching processes. Excessive idle and waiting periods between these processes are the main cause of long production lead times. Timing is especially critical in multiple parallel processes, where poor timing can significantly extend production lead times.

A good APS system like Asprova serves as an end-to-end scheduling solution, precisely and dynamically coordinating resources across the entire value chain, much like a conductor leading an orchestra. This capability is key to synchronizing your production processes. The quality of the parameters and the flexibility of scheduling logic in the APS system are essential to achieving this.

To ensure the best possible scheduling outcomes, Asprova’s scheduling(s) logic will be configured based on your unique needs, potentially targeting different goals. These objectives can be specific to your industry or business, such as meeting delivery deadlines, optimizing resource utilization, reducing inventory, or minimizing production costs. Industry-specific goals could include optimal batch sizes, paint sequence optimization in a paint shop, temperature sequence optimization in oven process, or factoring in expiration dates. Asprova’s APS system allows you to fine-tune scheduling logic through parameter adjustments, eliminating the need for programming.

Our APS system has been and is continuously developed in collaboration with leading lean companies worldwide across various industries to meet their highest demands for process synchronization—for over 30 years. All the necessary functions for optimal production scheduling are included in the standard parameters and the flexibly adjustable scheduling logic within the Asprova APS software.

Choosing the Right APS Software: What You Need to Know

Many companies have faced setbacks—sometimes more than once—when implementing an APS system. How can you avoid this? When choosing a software for Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS), consider these key factors:

Define Implementation Goals:
Restricting scheduling to micro areas of the factory has little impact on the overall outcome. The APS system you choose should have the capability to create end-to-end scheduling, orchestrating the entire enterprise. This means customer orders are scheduled comprehensively, accounting for all process-related connections, from customer orders to shipping, across all levels of the bill of materials. By implementing an APS system, processes across the entire organization can be improved to boost profitability and resilience.
Thus, it’s crucial that implementation goals are clearly defined when selecting an APS system:

• Improve delivery reliability
• Reduce stagnation
• Shorten lead times
• Lower inventory and WIP
• Reduce setup times
• Increase productivity in bottleneck processes
• Boost factory output
• Avoid part shortages
• Reduce effort for scheduling and control through automated scheduling processes

Achieving these goals leads to a reduction in manufacturing costs. An APS system should also provide the flexibility to adjust scheduling logic based on the relevant KPI and objectives, while assessing the results accordingly.

Creating a Digital Twin:
The properties, rules, and restrictions for your products, processes, resources, orders, inventory, customer agreements, scheduling logic, etc., are numerous and diverse. To generate realistic production schedules, it is essential to fully represent your reality within the Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) system through a digital twin. A digital twin is the virtual representation of a real object (factory), process, or system, and forms the foundation for the APS system. If even a few product or process properties, rules, or restrictions are incorrectly represented or cannot be modeled within the APS system, this will dynamically affect the scheduling of all orders and processes—rendering the scheduling results unusable within just a few days.

Custom Adjustments Without Programming
The algorithm of an APS software is highly complex. If significant programming is required, the logical consistency of the settings and scheduling logic may be compromised.

Flexible Adjustments in Scheduling Logic
The properties of products and processes vary greatly among manufacturers, even when producing the same product. Simple scheduling logic, such as backward or forward scheduling or bottleneck-focused scheduling, is not enough to achieve optimal results. In APS software, assignment rules for individual processes, resources, order types, and products must be configurable—without programming. Additionally, the entire scheduling logic must be flexible enough to shorten delivery times and optimize factory performance.

Accurate MRP Calculation
A key factor for short lead times and high delivery reliability is material availability. Material requirements for all items in the BOM span the entire value chain, and knowing the precise timing is critical for on-time delivery. Only a powerful APS system can accurately determine these timings. Traditional MRP calculations from ERP systems often fall short because they don’t dynamically account for factors like capacity, utilization, or backlog.
For true MRP accuracy, an APS system must generate real demand dates. Without this, part shortages and excess inventory are almost guaranteed.

Instant Simulations
Factory operations are subject to constant change. Therefore, running simulations to explore various possibilities is one of the primary tasks of a scheduler. They need to detect capacity and material shortages early and simulate workforce deployment to schedule the best possible scenario. Inventory fluctuations and supplier delays must also be factored in. For this, a powerful APS system is needed—one that delivers results not overnight, but in seconds.
Simulations are crucial for:

• Determining reliable delivery dates
• Detecting expected inventory fluctuations
• Assessing the impact of supplier delays
• Planning investments
• Scheduling workforce deployment

Simulations are essential for schedulers to create realistic short-term schedules and provide management with the necessary information for long-term planning.

The Difference Between APS Software and MES with “APS Module”
MES systems with “APS modules” lack the necessary algorithms and flexibility to create a digital twin and optimize production scheduling. MES/BDE systems only detect and process data from selected processes (historical production results), such as operation start and end times, quantities, quality characteristics, and maintenance information. A simple algorithm is sufficient for this. However, the technology of a digital twin requires complex algorithms to accurately model and simulate the manufacturing process. In fact, many who choose MES with optional “APS functionality” still rely heavily on manual scheduling.
It is impossible to simulate the entire value chain weeks or months in advance, optimize process synchronization, production lead times, delivery reliability, or inventory fluctuations with these systems. To benefit from the full potential of what an APS system can offer, it’s essential to use a “true” APS software.

Optimal Sequencing is Key for Process Synchronization
To achieve this, an APS should be capable of:

• Flexibly adjusting order prioritization rules (dispatching rules) to ensure an optimal sequence of orders.
• Sorting and prioritizing within the APS system’s dispatching rules based on product groups, customers, resource groups, individual resources, processes, order types, and more.
• Evaluating and selecting the optimal resources (machines, fixtures, workers, etc.) using weighted criteria, such as resource priority, minimizing setup/wait/production times, or load levelling.
• Running multiple automatic sorting and optimization cycles that build on each other. For example, the first optimization might focus on delivery dates, followed by product characteristics (size, color, etc.), and finally by packaging size to reduce setup time.
• Optimizing bottlenecks by combining forward and backward scheduling to minimize wait times and significantly shortens overall lead times. As bottleneck processes determine the production throughput, upstream and downstream processes will be scheduled around them.

The Right Partner for Implementing Production Scheduling Software
A powerful APS system will significantly improve your production output by synchronizing production processes. However, an APS system can only partially support the optimization of a factory’s operational standards (standard work, setup procedures, standard times, predefined buffer times/inventory, TQM, TPM, etc.).
AI, digitalization, and cloud systems are popular, but they won’t deliver results beyond the real capabilities of the factory. Therefore, it is advisable to strengthen KAIZEN initiatives (questioning and improving current process flows) when implementing an Advanced Production Scheduling system.
Introducing an APS system presents an ideal opportunity to challenge and improve existing operational processes. These improvements can be directly integrated into the master data of the APS system, optimizing scheduling results accordingly. Thus, the expertise of the implementation partner in providing holistic consulting is a critical factor for the successful implementation of an APS system.