Implementing production campaigns is one of the key disciplines of production sequence planning, hence playing an increasingly important role in the entire process industry – particularly in the chemical, pharmaceutical and food industries.
A production campaign (a grouping, an order network, an aggregated cascade) is a linkage of production orders from the central ERP (e.g. SAP production and/or process orders) comprising the same and/or different material numbers. Cascades, in turn, are classified as an additional characteristic of production sequencing, whereas those are described as a grouping of productions that build on one another. Both functions are controlled within advanced planning & scheduling.
The planning of production campaigns is about order scheduling according to predefined criteria in a way that relationships and offset times become involved. Both, orders and several production campaigns can be combined into one production campaign.
For the need to combine orders, master recipes are often modelled. They reflect
These master recipes may form the basis to derive orders, which describe the allocation of processes to resources and the material flow in time and space.
Production planners often have to ensure that a large number of orders have to be rescheduled as a whole to prevent negative influences on material provisions. ORSOFT therefore enables horizontal and vertical campaign planning or a combination thereof.