Turkish Technic Selects ICRON's MRO Planning Software

Turkish Technic has selected ICRON’s MRO Planning software to optimize routine maintenance packages for aircraft. Using the software’s Maintenance Cards Interval functionality, Turkish Technic will be able to optimize balancing the distribution of task cards for planned maintenance. According to ICRON, this will increase productivity by minimizing early task card application and increase aircraft flight time.

“One of the most challenging problems for airlines and MRO companies in [the] aviation industry is to apply several maintenance cards that have different application intervals by keeping the duration of aircraft on the ground at a minimum,” says Ahmet Karaman, Turkish Technic’s general manager. “After a detailed research process, we have chosen ICRON for the optimization of our maintenance cards.”

The software, which is part of ICRON’s graphical scheduling and modeling system (GSAMS) platform, has functionality to coordinate schedules for workforce, spare parts, equipment and more. ICRON says it allows for real-time visibility of all day-to-day operations while reducing turnaround times and cost. The software’s user interface supports mobile devices and can run on the cloud, although the company says most customers prefer local server architecture for security reasons.

Turkish Technic says the goal with implementing the new software is to keep aircraft in the air as much as possible by decreasing maintenance turnaround time and minimizing maintenance occurrences at the macro level. According to a spokesperson for the company, ICRON’s software will support these goals by determining the maintenance check concept in a very short time for a new fleet and analyzing the plausibility of check intervals for the existing sub-fleet types.

Maarten Baltussen, ICRON’s chief revenue officer, says the new contract with Turkish Technic is a milestone in the company’s 25-year history. “After having SAESL, the MRO division of Singapore Airlines (Singapore Airlines Engineering Company), as a customer for several years, getting Turkish Technic on board means the recognition of ICRON as a market leader in airline MRO solutions,” he says.

According to ICRON, SAESL’s implementation of its MRO software has dramatically reduced repair turnaround time by automatically updating and optimizing the company’s schedule six times a day in less than half an hour.

Turkish Technic aims to have writing of the software’s code completed at the end of April and it will be designing user interfaces in the meantime. The company’s goal is to go live with the new optimization tool by the end of May.

Only 50% of companies can measure the cost of their data, ICRON survey shows

50% of companies are not able to measure the cost of their data, according to the results of a survey conducted by ICRON, a leading provider of Optimized Decision Making and Supply Chain Optimization software solutions. The survey, which was completed by 165 executives at the IoT EurAsia 2018 event held in Istanbul last week, revealed that approximately half of companies – and only 35% in the manufacturing sector and 43% in the services sector – can accurately gauge their data costs, which may include costs for data collection, data cleaning, data updating, and data storage and access.

The survey also showed that only 68% of the data collected by companies is considered to be reliable and of good quality, while 32% of the data is thought to be unreliable and of poor quality. Only 12% of the respondents said that all the data that their companies collect is reliable and accurate. Furthermore, the group of executives who admitted that they don’t know the cost of their companies’ data also said that only 62% of their data is reliable and of good quality – which means that around 38% of their data costs are related to data that they deem to be unreliable and of substandard quality. 

Alfred den Besten, ICRON’s Chief Marketing Officer, commented: “The results of our survey are fascinating, as such a high percentage of respondents stated that they don’t know what the true cost of their data is and that they think their data is not reliable and of subpar quality. This means that many companies are burning money on collecting and maintaining useless data, and that unreliable data is being used to make important business decisions – and this poses a major risk. To be successful, companies must be able to assess the cost and improve the accuracy of their data and use their data to make the best possible decisions.” ICRON’s President A. Tamer Ünal – who gave a presentation at the IoT EurAsia event on the topic of how to “Instantly transform your data into optimized decisions” – remarked: “Companies today have access to a tremendous amount of data from various sources including IoT devices and back-office systems, and data is the key driver of their business decisions.

The fact that so many executives don’t have a handle on their data costs and don’t trust the reliability of their data demonstrates that there is a real need for systems and solutions that enhance data utilization. ICRON’s groundbreaking optimized decision making platform does exactly that, enabling companies to use their data to automatically generate optimal plans and projections and make optimized decisions that minimize costs and maximize productivity and performance.”

 ICRON will be releasing the full results of the survey in the coming weeks.

Scenario Planning and Optimization in Integrated Business Planning Webinar

By utilizing a well-executed Integrated Business Planning process (IBP), companies can achieve cross-functional alignment, optimize costs and improve customer satisfaction. The need for both strategic and tactical agility is manifested in the ability to anticipate changes in demand and supply conditions, investigate ad-hoc scenarios and generate executable plans.

Integrated Business Planning process has extended the Sales & Operations Planning process and has now been the best practice in the industry. The process is led by senior management and aims to align company plans every month to allocate the critical resources - people, equipment, inventory, materials, time and money - to most effectively satisfy your customers, in a profitable way.

IBP is a complex process and unfortunately, many companies are trying to run it manually using spreadsheets with the help of their ERP or SCM software. To make this manual process practical, the companies does a lot of aggregation and abstraction and try to focus more on bottleneck resolution rather than optimization. The process also does not allow significant what-if-analysis (scenario planning).

There is actually a way to significantly automate and improve the IBP process with focus on speed, optimization and multiple scenario analysis : Mathematical optimization. This method is available since early 1940s but it was mostly a luxury for significantly large companies until recently. Now with the advances in computer technology and advanced planning and scheduling technologies, mathematical optimization can be applied to IBP process.

In the Scenario Planning and Optimization in Integrated Business Planning (IBP) webinar to discover how companies like ASML, Vestel and Trakya Cam are utilizing ICRON Advanced Planning and Scheduling to evaluate multiple scenarios, rapidly generate optimized plans and compare financial and operational KPIs to make informed decisions in their S&OP/IBP processes.

Click here or image below to access the webinar recording : IBP Webinar video.

Webinar is conducted by the Chief Technology Officer of ICRON Technologies, Zeki Caner Taşkın. Mr. Taşkın joined ICRON in 2001 and specializes on large-scale optimization methods and software. He was named the recipient of the 2010 Pritsker Doctoral Dissertation Award given by the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) and his research has appeared in many leading Operations Research journals. Caner received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida and as an academic he teaches in the Industrial Engineering department of Bogazici University.

Next Generation Advanced Planning and Scheduling for Manufacturing Webinar

Production Planning and Scheduling in modern manufacturing environment has become quite complex. But unfortunately many ERP solutions, even in their production planning and scheduling modules, do not provide a satisfactory mechanism to handle the complexity of the problem. These ERP, MRP or MPS mechanisms are transactional and designed for mass production facilities of past with low product mix, generous inventory sizes and relatively simple supply chain networks.

Since the complexity is not addressed by the systems in hand, most planners rely on a cumbersome, time-consuming, error-prone and manual process run on many Excel files. But this does not need to be the case and there is a superior and highly successful process out there : Advanced Planning and Scheduling.

Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) is a software platform which deploys advanced mathematical algorithms or logic to perform optimization and/or and/or simulation on finite capacity scheduling, sourcing, capital planning, resource planning, forecasting, demand planning and others.

In this webinar, you will have a chance to see a modern Advanced Planning and Scheduling Platform, ICRON, in action. The webinar first introduces APS and why it is needed. Then, it lists some of the characteristics (or musts) of a next generation Advanced Planning and Scheduling platform for manufacturing. Later you will see a demo of the application (the specific domain selected in this demo is paper production planning and scheduling but the concept can also be applied to broader process manufacturing).

The demo displays the capabilities of ICRON APS in 3 levels of planning : Tactical Planning, Operational Planning and Dispatching. The corresponding modules of the application in the demo are ICRON S&OP, ICRON Capacity Planner and ICRON Detailed Scheduler.

The next webinar is on July 17th 2017 on below time :

Singapore / Malaysia / Hong Kong / Taiwan / Philippines                : 09:00 – 10:00 AM
Thailand / Indonesia / Vietnam                                                          : 08:00 – 09:00 AM

You can use this link to register : Next Generation Advanced Planning and Scheduling for Manufacturing Webinar Registration

You can watch an old webinar below.

Optimization and Scenario Based Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) for Manufacturing Webinar

Although the computer technology as well as the available advanced planning and scheduling platforms has matured to a level to provide advanced optimization based Sales and Operations Planning for many manufacturing facilities within a very reasonable budget, most companies still deploy old school, cumbersome and very slow S&OP processes.

In this webinar, Associate Professor Caner Taşkın from Bogazici University (VP of Technology in ICRON Technologies) presents how mathematical optimization is accessible for Sales & Operations Planning thanks to advances in computer technology and proven optimization engines like ICRON. He also presents some real life examples of optimization and scenario based S&OP.

Mr. Taşkın starts with an introduction to S&OP and then details how modern S&OP process should be. Later in the webinar, he gives case studies and sample implementations of Optimization and Scenario Based Sales & Operations Planning using ICRON Technologies.

Optimization and Scenario Based Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) for Manufacturing Webinar 

About ICRON Technologies

Founded in 1992, ICRON Technologies Inc. is a leading developer of Advanced Planning, Scheduling (APS) and Optimization solutions for manufacturing, distribution, MRO and Services organizations. Once deployed it allows large enterprise companies to improve their supply chain operations by better streamlining inventory keeping, production (constraints), and sourcing of material including lead time with forecasted demand. More than 70 customers used the software today including ASML, Singapore Airlines, Rolls Royce, Bridgestone, DHL, Ford, Rohm & Haas, and others. The company is headquartered in Amsterdam with R&D in Istanbul and an office in Singapore. 
www.icrontech.com

ICRON Technologies Advanced Planning, Scheduling and Optimization in Singapore

ICRON Technologies B.V., a Netherlands based Advanced Planning, Scheduling and Optimization solution provider is setting up an office in Singapore. ICRON Technologies Asia Pacific will serve South East Asia and East Asia markets to help companies to solve their planning, scheduling, supply chain network optimization, demand planning and S&OP problems.

ICRON Technologies has more than 20 years of experience in Advanced Planning, Scheduling and Optimization and their solutions are used in some well established companies like ASML, Vestel, LG, Singapore Airlines, Rolls Royce, Bridgestone, Perfetti van Melle, etc. The company builts these solutions on their Advanced Planning and Scheduling engine and is known for fast implementation times hovering around 3 months. Their product family includes :

- ICRON Advanced Planning and Scheduling (ICRON APS) - Enterprise level finite capacity planning and scheduling solution offering offers a clear, cost-effective migration path to full-function supply chain optimization.

- ICRON Capacity Planning (ICRON CP) - Enterprise level supply chain network optimization solution providing strategic and tactical (long-term) planning of supply chain network including customers, production facilities, distribution centers, warehouses and transportation routes.

- ICRON Demand Planning (ICRON DP) - With ICRON DP, companies can accurately model their multiple forecasting inputs creating their unique forecasting algorithms and methodologies to drive forecast improvement across all types of products (fast- and slow-moving, lumpy, short life cycle, trending, steady, highly seasonal, causal driven) on different levels across your value chain. It introduces demand optimization to your organization by applying mathematical optimization techniques to identify the best combination of price and promotion to achieve desired sales, gross margin, inventory or market share objectives.

ICRON Advanced Planning and Scheduling system.

- ICRON Sales and Operations Planning (ICRON S & OP) - ICRON S&OP helps companies keep demand and supply in balance and achieve synchronization among different functions in the organization by rapidly generating high-quality plans and enabling ad-hoc scenario analysis.

About ICRON Technologies

Founded in 1992, ICRON Technologies Inc. is a leading developer of Advanced Planning, Scheduling (APS) and Optimization solutions for manufacturing, distribution, MRO and Services organizations. Once deployed it allows large enterprise companies to improve their supply chain operations by better streamlining inventory keeping, production (constraints), and sourcing of material including lead time with forecasted demand. More than 70 customers used the software today including ASML, Singapore Airlines, Rolls Royce, Bridgestone, DHL, Ford, Rohm & Haas, and others. The company is headquartered in Amsterdam with R&D in Istanbul and an office in Singapore. 

Business Intelligence vs. Business Analytics

Business Analytics (BA) and Business Intelligence (BI) are usually used used interchangeably but there are some key differences between these two and Business Analytics is not Business Intelligence!

Business analytics makes extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive modeling, and fact-based management to drive decision making. Analytics may be used as input for human decisions or may drive fully automated decisions. On the other hand Business intelligence is more about querying, reporting, OLAP, and "alerts".

In this sense, most business intelligence / business analytics tools in the market offers a mix of BA and BI. Some are more BA tool than BI tool and some are more BI tool than BA tool.

Below image shows the Business Analytics levels. There are 2 main level: Reactive decision making and Proactive decision making. And Business Analytics is a term which should be used for proactive  decision making, which is predicting the future. So from bottom up the tools you have (in the order of increasing competitive advantage and degree of intelligence):

Business Intelligence vs. Business Analytics

 Standard Reporting - What happened?
Ad Hoc Reports - How many, how often, where?
Query Drilldown - Where exactly is the problem?
Alerts - What actions are needed?
Statistical Analysis - What is happening?
Forecasting - What will happen next?
Predictive Analysis - What is the best that can happen?
Optimization - Lets' act on it.