Many of the challenges faced by the world’s automotive and equipment manufacturers can be mitigated via flexible production planning. By digitalizing and automating their production planning processes, manufacturers can respond faster and more profitably when confronted with demand variability, materials shortages, logistics roadblocks and other supply chain issues.  

Enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), modern planning solutions enable manufacturers to create smart, flexible production plans that are continuously updated in response to real-time data. Unlike traditional, static planning cycles, driven by outdated systems and organizational structures, digitalization ushers in a new era of planning speed, accuracy and responsiveness. The right planning and scheduling decisions can be made in seconds, powered by AI, based on achieving predefined cost, service, utilization, sustainability and other targets. 

All of this sounds great in theory. But what practical benefits does advanced production planning software deliver? 

The Blue Yonder Platform — which spans production planning, scheduling, sequencing and slotting — has been proven to drive enormous benefits, including improved profitability, increased asset utilization and a more accurate demand-supply match. Take a few minutes to review these real-world customer success stories, and imagine where Blue Yonder production planning solutions can take your own business. 

Dynamically replanning as demand shifts 

A manufacturer of light trucks that produces commercial vehicles for the European market needed to optimize planning across several production lines. The manufacturer needed to  respond quickly to fluctuations in market demand, while optimally scheduling orders to eliminate any loss of productivity or production bottlenecks. 

Agile planning capabilities from Blue Yonder provided the answer. The Blue Yonder Platform ensures that all production lines are optimally utilized, and that dependent upstream assembly lines are also perfectly coordinated. The intuitive Blue Yonder Platform creates transparency and clearly displays the status of all production lines and components — while also tracking the availability of necessary components in real time. Order changes can be made based on assured material availability. Orders that cannot be built, based on a lack of materials or components, are rescheduled with sufficient lead time.  

Today the truck manufacturer can adapt to changing demand, while still optimizing capacities and service levels. Planners have real-time visibility to any supply bottlenecks, so they can agilely manage constraints. The customer reports there are no additional costs caused by last-minute rescheduling, since the Blue Yonder solution supports fact-based, profitable decisions.  

Combining standardization with flexibility 

A manufacturer of forklift trucks, warehouse equipment and automation technology was relying on traditional, static planning processes and legacy solutions that were not built for today’s demand and supply volatility. Across six European plants, the company needed to optimize sequence planning and production control to increase responsiveness to variability — taking into account production orders with varied characteristics and four-week lead times. Planners also needed to consider constraints on capacities, deadlines, and workloads. The complexity of this planning challenge, and the need to replan dynamically, exceeded manual analysis and human cognition. 

Enter agile, automated planning and sequencing capabilities from Blue Yonder, enabled by AI. By integrating its production planning solutions directly with the customer’s SAP, Blue Yonder enabled its sequencing solution to access the operations lists for each production order — as well as all operations required to manufacture a product. For each operation, the Blue Yonder Platform displays the planned production orders for each work center, along with the standard values used to determine the dates or the workload. Production planners have a real-time view of the best possible sequence, taking into consideration all assembly and procurement restrictions.  

The agile Blue Yonder planning and sequencing solution enables the truck and equipment manufacturer to manage complex processes in a standardized way, reliably meeting production targets while maximizing capacities and minimizing costs. Additional time and resource savings are achieved because planning productivity is significantly improved. Planners can customize and interact with flexible Blue Yonder solutions to easily, quickly and efficiently replan as conditions change. 

Increasing planning speed, responsiveness via the cloud 

A sports car manufacturer with an order horizon of several months was looking for an automated software solution for daily planning. Its legacy planning software was outdated and not very user-friendly — with long run times and a complex approval process. The company needed a solution that supported process standardization, but was also flexible enough to accommodate seven different plants with different planning requirements. To maximize launch speed and daily planning speed, the manufacturer was looking for a cloud-native solution.  

A software-as-a-service (SaaS) sequencing solution from Blue Yonder was the perfect fit. This solution enables the manufacturer to more easily accomplish short-term, dynamic planning, as well as planning over longer horizons of up to one year. The cloud-based sequencing solution was deployed across all seven plants quickly and seamlessly. As a result, the manufacturer reports that run times have been reduced from several minutes to a few seconds. This has increased real-time transparency, response times and overall production stability. 

What does your Blue Yonder success story look like? 

No matter what your primary production planning challenges are — from demand variability to supply bottlenecks — Blue Yonder can help you combine flexible manufacturing with process standardization and cost control. Download our Guide to Production Planning in Manufacturing, or contact Blue Yonder to start writing your own success story.