An Introduction to Oracle

Production Scheduling

December 2008
 Introduction to Oracle Production Scheduling

INTRODUCTION
Oracle Production Scheduling provides best-in-class scheduling functionality
through a variety of highly differentiated capabilities:
ƒ Automatic Floating Bottleneck Detection
ƒ Advanced Analytical Decision Support
ƒ Direct Scenario Comparison
ƒ Intuitive Data Model

AUTOMATIC FLOATING BOTTLENECK DETECTION

Oracle Production Scheduling reduces initial implementation and ongoing
maintenance costs through a self-configuring Solver. To understand this next-
generation technology, it is necessary to consider current-generation approaches
and their inherent limitations.
Implementing current-generation scheduling products requires extensive “expert
tinkering” to create usable production schedules. During this implementation
tinkering phase, expensive consultants hard-code rules for many aspects of the
scheduling problem. By specifying the bottlenecks, sequencing rules, etc. a usable
schedule can be created. However, this approach is expensive and time consuming.
Furthermore, solution quality inherently degrades as the assumptions underlying
the hard-coded rules change over time. For example, changes to demand mix and
capacity constraints are normal in any business, but these change the assumptions
of the original rules and will reduce schedule quality. As schedule quality reduces,
planners try to maintain quality by over-riding the system with time consuming and
subjective manual schedule changes. Often planners discontinue use of the system
entirely and revert to their previous planning methods.

Conversely, Oracle Production Scheduling is able to automatically detect resource

bottlenecks, even when they dynamically “float” (move) within a given schedule.
Resource bottlenecks may float from crew, to tool, to materials, to machine, etc.
throughout the scheduling horizon. Armed with resource bottleneck knowledge,
the PS Solver employs the ideal scheduling strategy to exploit each particular type
of bottleneck and maximize manufacturing throughput. The result is that there is
no expensive initial rule configuration and schedule quality remains consistent over
the lifecycle of the implementation. Rather than focusing on rule customization
and maintenance, the planner focuses on scheduling.

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 Dynamic bottleneck detection is such an important concept in Production
Scheduling that there is a specific view dedicated to visualizing bottlenecks while
schedules are being solved. The Resource Contention view allows planners to
watch the Solver dynamically detect and exploit resource bottlenecks. Red
indicates serious resource criticality, with shades of orange, yellow and green
denoting decreasing criticality. Once the solve finishes, the Resource Contention
view displays a histogram of the resources that drove the majority of scheduling
decisions. In the example below, the planner can quite clearly see that the bright
red Electrical Tester machine is the dominant resource bottleneck at that point in
the solve.

“Software for Planners – Not for Programmers”

The breakthrough technology that enables automatic bottleneck detection is called

“Constraint Directed Search” (CDS). CDS is the logical evolution of Constraint-
Based Scheduling, but does not suffer from the limitations that historically plagued
Constraint-Based approaches.

CONSTRAINT BASED SCHEDULING LIMITATIONS

Constraint-Based schedulers have always had inherently strong schedule
representational capabilities and this has enabled an accurate and detailed model of
the factory. Constraint propagation is also an extremely efficient method for
determining the consequences of scheduling decisions. However, although
propagation will usually find a feasible solution, it has often required an excessive
amount of time, particularly on large problems. These large problems are relatively
common in industry, so this very promising technology has struggled in the real
world for the following reasons:
1. Constraint-Based schedulers must assign a start time to each operation and
resolve resulting conflicts before reaching a feasible solution. This causes
thrashing and leads to excessive backtracking (undoing unworkable
decisions), which significantly increases solve time.
2. To prevent thrashing, implementers must customize algorithms for every
implementation. Because this approach takes an existing set of rules,

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 developed according to industry, and tries to fit them to a new problem,
much tinkering with the algorithm is required. At worst, invasive changes
to source code could be required, which will complicate version upgrades
down the road. This increases both implementation time and cost. In
addition, custom algorithms cannot respond satisfactorily to floating
bottleneck problems.
3. As a result of this customization, current generation technology provides
poor generality. If the business changes, the technology cannot respond
without further customization, delays, and expense.
4. In many cases, current generation solvers cannot find good solutions even
when they exist.

CONSTRAINT DIRECTED SEARCH ADVANTAGES

Constraint Directed Search (CDS) enjoys the benefits of Constraint-Based without
the performance problems, by employing smart technology that eliminates
guesswork and prevents making a wrong decision. There are several facets to this
breakthrough technology:
1. Texture measurements:
ƒ Determine the most critical decision to make by measuring local
schedule conditions to identify bottlenecks before making a decision.
ƒ Minimize or completely eliminate backtracking by returning not
simply to the last decision made but to the most uncertain previous
decision.
ƒ Allow much larger problems to be solved.
ƒ Reduce solve time significantly.
2. Least commitment:
ƒ Assigns operation precedence constraints so that a start time need not
be assigned. This allows operations to “float” within a constraint
feasible time range, until the end when an explicit start time is
assigned.
ƒ Finds the critical paths in a schedule.
ƒ Allows more flexibility in scheduling by tracking slack time.
ƒ Avoids deadlock in the propagation process.
ƒ Allows start time optimization after sequencing.
ƒ Allows dynamic schedule monitoring, for example, to determine
whether a late-starting operation will also cause the order to be late.
3. Production Scheduling seamlessly supports both generative scheduling and
repair-based scheduling.
4. Production Scheduling goes beyond bi-directional propagation by allowing
not only forward and backward propagation but propagation in all
dimensions of a scheduling problem, including resource utilization and
inventory.

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ADVANCED ANALYTICAL DECISION SUPPORT

PRODUCTION PEGGING VIEW

Production Scheduling provides many ways for Planners to understand their schedule.
Chief among these is the Production Pegging view, which is used to analyze projected
customer service levels and the supply constraints dictating these levels.

All purchased and manufactured supply is pegged to each demand line item to allow
the planner to understand what orders are late and what specifically is preventing these
orders from being met on-time. The Production Pegging view supports this through
several key capabilities:
1. User-defined demand sorting
The sorting of demands (Sales Orders, Forecasts, etc.) is defined by the user-
defined folder structure specified in the Supply & Demand Editor. The folder
structure can represent product types, demand types, customer hierarchies,
etc. – whatever sorting is most intuitive for the planner to analyze the
schedule with.
2. Graphical Demand Fill Rates
The folder summary bars will have varying colors (black, yellow, orange, red)
depending on the amount of on-time demand (ie. the unit fill %). Demands or
demand folders with red summary bars have less than 33% of units on-time,
orange bars have between 33-66% of units on-time, yellow have between 66-
99% and black summary bars are 100% on-time. Tooltips describing fill rate
and demand lateness details are provided when the cursor is positioned over
the summary bars.
3. Alerts with Root Cause
PS supports a variety of alerts, one of which warns the planner of projected
late orders and their root causes, with a direct drilldown into the Production
Pegging View. This drilldown automatically opens the Production Pegging

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 View tree right to the bottleneck operation pegged to the late demand.

4. Dynamic Demand Filtering

To enable planners to manage by exception, the ability to filter the potentially
thousands of orders by user-specified criteria is supported. For example,
although there are 8 of 31 line items late in the schedule, by filtering out those
less than 1 day late the planner learns that there are really only 4 line items
more than 1 day late and all other orders are temporarily filtered out.

PS also allows planners to toggle between a demand-centric view and a work order-
centric view of the schedule. This new view displays the complete pegging of supply to
all work orders, as well as work order due date performance.

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RESOURCE-UTILIZATION GANTT
The Resource-Utilization Gantt is a combined view that allows the planner to see
the details of how operations are scheduled on their machines, crews and tools,
while also viewing resource utilization for the currently selected resource in a bar
chart. The utilization can be displayed in shift, daily, weekly or monthly buckets
and by selecting a particular time bucket the planner is displayed the breakdown of
idle, delay, down, changeover and run time.

The Resource Utilization also supports the display of utilization across groups of
resources. This is useful when trying to understand aggregate utilization of like
resources, such as a pool of machines or crew.

RESOURCE-OPERATION GANTT
The Resource-Operation Gantt is a combined view that provides a very convenient
display of how operations are scheduled. All operations on the currently selected
resource are displayed in the lower pane automatically and sorted chronologically to
ensure the planner can see them immediately.

The automatic sorting is in context of the zoom at the moment the resource was
selected, so when zooming in or out the planner will re-select the resource if they
want the operations re-sorted.

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RESOURCE / OPERATION GANTT - ITEM GRAPH
While the Production Pegging View is where a Make-to-Order planner spends most
of their time, the Resource / Operation Gantt – Item Graph combined view is
ideal for Make-to-Stock environments like Consumer Packaged Goods or Food &
Beverage.

The Resource and Operation Gantt panes in this view allow the planner to
understand the sequence being run on each resource. In the above example, the
planner can see that Packer 1 has a weekly campaign cycle where time lost to
sequence dependent changeovers has been absolutely minimized. By selecting each
packing operation the Item Graph pane displays produced and consumed inventory
levels and inventory levels are perfectly supported.
The above examples are only a subset of the analytical views Production Scheduling
supports. The 8 basic views can be used on their own, or combined together
through an easy to use Wizard.

DIRECT SCENARIO COMPARISONS

PS provides a powerful ability to directly and easily compare different schedule
scenarios. Within one session, the planner can make an un-limited number of
scenarios and compare them using the Key Performance Indicators view.

Standard supply chain metrics are provided to assess which scenario best meets
business objectives and the planner can sort scenarios by the KPI they are

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interested in. Conversely, most competitive products only support a single scenario
in one session. This forces planners to repeatedly save the various scenarios and
run multiple sessions simultaneously, which makes it very difficult to determine the
ideal scenario.
In addition to KPI comparisons, schedules can also be directly compared to each
other from a customer service perspective. This allows planners to get a detailed
understanding as to which scenario best meets their customer service objectives.
This capability answers key questions like:
ƒ In this new scenario, what orders are now on-time compared to my best
previous scenario?
ƒ In this new scenario, what orders are now late compared to my best
previous scenario?
ƒ In this new scenario, what is the impact on overall earliness or lateness?

Once the planner decides which schedule they prefer, they approve it and then
publish it to ERP.
PS ability to directly and easily compare different scenarios is a major differentiator.

INTUITIVE DATA MODEL

The PS user-interface is intuitive and graphical, which makes it easy to create, view,
or edit model data, such as changeover rules, calendars, resources, operations, and
routings. This makes simulations easy and enables planners to easily navigate their
model through convenient Where Used enquiries on any model object. The
following are some examples of this.

CHANGEOVER EDITOR
Oracle Production Scheduling provides powerful rules capabilities to easily describe
all possible changeovers. By using Resource and Operation Groups based upon
operation atributes and All (*), a single rule can describe many potential changeover
combinations. The rules are run from top-to-bottom and the first rule that

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matches each operation-to-operation combination is used. To allow planners to
audit that rules are correct, the bottom of the Changeover Editor has a query
mechanism where planners specify a single resource and operation-to-operation
changeover instance and the first corresponding rule is highlighted.

CALENDAR EDITOR
The Calendar Editor is graphical and easy to use. Creating or editing uptime or
downtime events is very similar to Microsoft Outlook calendar events. Downtime
is supported as either interruptible Delay Time, or non-interruptible Down Time.
Typically, Delay Time is used because most manufacturing operations can be
started prior to downtime and completed after the downtime delay.

Each resource (Machine, Crew, Tool) in the model can have a different availability
calendar, or calendars can be common across a department or plant. This will
depend on how overtime is typically planned in the factory. If overtime is planned
across a department, then a departmental approach is best. In any case, in the

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schedule Resource Gantt view a resource calendar can be over-ridden by the
planner by editing the narrow horizontal calendar events.

OPERATION EDITOR
A PS operation is a bill-of-resource, where the bill-of-material structure is unified
with all machine, crew and tool resource requirements. Simultaneous resource
usage is supported and alternatives are supported for all resources (including items).
This provides a very rich representational model that is capable of modeling almost
any manufacturing process, particularly when combined with the comprehensive PS
routing operation precedence relationships.

GRAPHICAL ROUTINGS

The routing diagrams in Production Scheduling provide a visual overview of the

steps required to manufacture an item. PS supports very flexible routings:
All operation-to-operation precedence constraints are supported. There are
13 possible operation-to-operation precedence relationships and PS supports all of
them. For example, Minimum Separation can be used to reflect a delay between
operations, due to things such as material cool-down. Maximum Separation can
impose a maximum delay, due to things such as spoilage.

Parallel processing streams are supported

Most scheduling products only support serial operation relationships in routings.
Either they require multiple routings and WIP / sub-assembly items to be defined
if parallel processing occurs. Alternatively, they impose artificial “overlap”
constraints to avoid the extra routings and items. However, the overlap
relationships defined between operations on the various processing “legs” are not
real, so they over-constrain the schedule. The real constraint is that all legs must
finish before a certain operation can begin. For example, in the routing below there
is no relationship between the Cut Fronts operation, the Cut Backs operation and
the Cut Sides operation. Nor is there a relationship between the Grind Front, Back
and Sides operations. The only real constraint is that Weld cannot occur before all
the Grind operations complete and that Cut operations occur before their
respective Grind operations.

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There is a lot more to the PS user-interface, but this small overview shows that the
PS learning curve for new planners is quite short. Many new users have expressed
that someone with a strong manufacturing background does not need any formal
training, because the software is so intuitive. Formal training is advocated and is
important to successful implementations, but this observation underscores the high
degree of PS usability.

CONCLUSION
Oracle Production Scheduling is a mature and proven product with tremendous
functional breadth and depth. At the same time, total-cost-of-ownership is
minimized through self-configuring Solver technology and an intuitive, highly
graphical user-interface. Combined with out-of-the-box ERP integration with JD
Edwards EnterpriseOne and Oracle E-Business Suite ERP, Oracle Production
Scheduling has a significant value proposition.

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Production Scheduling Solver Overview
April 2008
Author: APS Product Management

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