Bottleneck Oriented Load Planning In Heat Treatment

Sustaining decent profit and efficiencies in heat treating has gotten more and more difficult. There is obviously the economic crisis causing the biggest impact on all of us and we all  hope this will finally come to an end. Nevertheless knowing the true dynamic capacity of our - still partially turned down - equipment and being able to squeeze out even the smallest capability will optimize the cost to earnings ratio.

We are all using a variety of computer aided technology in daily work. Bigger companies might have sophisticated ERP systems supporting their work-flow, other companies might have something similar on a smaller scale, however, the disadvantage of such systems lies in their missing awareness of what really has to be done with the parts if it comes to breaking down the shop orders into real loads.  Would different parts fit into the same load and still be processed within specification? What about  urgent orders within a tough time table?How would this affect the planning process? Would it be an advantage to fire up a turned down furnace and still make profit?

The presentation will give an overview on the existing IT layers used in heat treating and explain how these different layers have to communicate in order to provide a reliable work plan. Most planning tools are using methods like pull or push. This Optimized Production Technology approach focuses on the bottlenecks in the production chain trying to maximize the throughput while at the same time trying to minimize the total number of equipment used – hence saving resources.