Chemical Manufacturer Planning and Capacity Management Process

[Former Member]

Hello all,

I am doing a consulting assignment - continuous improvement project at a bulk chemical manufacturer. They have a problem assessing their capacity to manufacturer (they use SAP but do not have a finite planning tool) and plan outbound transportation. Outbound shipments are in bulk tanker trucks. They don't seem to have a clear picture of there ability to execute and plan the business therefore they are always in a state of chaos.

The do not have effective metrics in place to measure schedule adherence and to determine what capacity they have to increase shipments or decrease the available staffing required to match the level of business that they have.

Is there someone in this group that has experience with bulk chemical process including PP and SD?

Regards

Dean Maple

[Former Member]

Hi Dean,

I am not clear, where the problem resides. Is it the assessment of production capacity, e.g. slack capacity, no transparency of the produciton plan, e.g. when will production be finished and ready to be shipped, or is it rather a problem to order the tank cars just in time. Another question is: are there storage tanks or is the product directly picked from production. From what I read I would suggest some kind of detailed scheduling tool, e.g. APO PP/DS to get a better transparancy in the planning. PP also offers some planning, also capacity planning, however in a rough cut way.

Regards,

Hans

[Dsk · Accepted solution]

Hi,

1. I have worked on a SAP Impl for a Bulk manufacturing chemicals company.

2. But generally the demand is driven through forecast and sales requrirement like Agreement with customers.

3. In my case we had tanks that will generally store this bulk material and also it would be loaded directly into the containers.

4. managing capacity is little tricky because it has few dependencies.

• Like the batch that it can produce.

• production in the pipeline.

• Direct production ( loading directly to the truck) or loading to the storage tank.

5. here we used REPetitive manufacutuing and was able to make a rough estimate on the capcity.

6. And mostly in SAP - the capcity is determined in terms of the hour and not interms of the storage capacity of tanks.

so mostly the manual intervention of the planning person on consultation with the warehouse was very much required.

i have just dotted some of my experince.

reg

dsk