Advanced Planning and Scheduling for Electronics Manufacturing : Vestel Case

Manufacturing in 21st century is a complex task. It is mostly Make-to-order and the production is highly capital-intensive. The high product mix combined with large number of components or manufacturing tasks makes it already a big challenge to plan but because there is little to no stock to shield manufacturing from changes in demand, frequent schedule changes creates extra complexity.

Most manufacturing companies have ERP and Supply Chain Management systems but these do not help a lot. The logic in these systems are developed and matured in 1980s and they are transactional systems, developed for make-to-stock, low product-mix, high order volume manufacturing.

Since ERP systems are not helping a lot, most planners use spreadsheets to create a more executable and feasible plan. But this manual process is cumbersome, time consuming, slow, inflexible and error prone. It does not also allow to deploy optimization (a supply chain which is not optimized is usually 15% - 20% more costly to operate). Excel is free, readily available but Excel based planning is costly.

But there is a solution which is much superior when it comes to planning : Advanced Planning and Scheduling. Advanced Planning and Scheduling is a software platform which deploys advanced mathematical algorithms or logic to perform optimization, and/or simulation on finite capacity scheduling, sourcing, capital planning, resource planning, forecasting, demand planning and others. This platform can :

• reduce planning / scheduling cycle by 70 – 90% 
• shift the organization from reactive to proactive planning
• create a centralized planning / scheduling for all (SVOT)
• reduce overtime, inventory costs, WIP times, setup times
• increase customer service level and revenue

Electronics manufacturers can benefit from an APS platform tremendously. There are some manufacturers deploying this technology for years. One such company is Vestel Group.

Advanced Planning and Scheduling plarform

Vestel Group is comprised of 24 companies operating in manufacturing, software and  technology development, mareting, and distribution fields in the consumer electronics,  household appliances, mobile technologies, LED lighting, and defense industries.  Vestel exports its products to 149 countries under the leading Japanese and European  brands. 

Vestel uses a highly flexible, integrated, and automated S&OP process developed on ICRON Advanced Planning and Scheduling solution. ICRON’s solution – which was developed, tested, integrated with Vestel’s existing ERP system – was implemented over the course of six months and became immediately fully operational.

You can read how Vestel uses Advanced Planning and Scheduling for different levels of planning such as Sales & Operations Planning, Capacity Planning and detailed scheduling here : Vestel Advanced Planning and Scheduling Case Study.