Dynamic zoom provides an overview in production planning

With the newly developed “Dynamic Zoom”, the production planner can quickly recognize all the consequences that his decisions have on the production process and can thus efficiently minimize set-up times and meet delivery deadlines.

Release 7.0 of the detailed planning software “Fekor” makes production planning for extrusion and injection moulding simpler and clearer. With the newly developed “Dynamic Zoom”, the production planner can quickly recognize all the consequences that his decisions have on the production process and can thus efficiently minimize set-up times and meet delivery deadlines.

The heart of the production planning software Fekor – the control station – was developed by FLS FertigungsLeitSysteme GmbH & Co. KG has now fundamentally revised it and equipped it with a new graphical user interface.

One of the new features is the “Dynamic Zoom”, which makes complex production processes transparent: When the planner wants to analyze a certain order, he activates the zoom with a mouse click and only sees those links that are related to the currently selected process. In this way he does not burden himself with things that are not relevant to his current task; he can make well-founded decisions and act quickly.

Detailed production planning is a highly complex task: even with only 10 orders in front of a workstation, there are 3.6 million different ways to optimize their sequence. In addition, the consequences of a decision usually affect other production stages. This is where the dynamic zoom helps: Everything that is not directly related to an order is hidden.

One of the strengths of the system is that it takes the special features of the plastics industry into account: When extruding plastic, for example, Fekor controls the sequence of colors from light to dark in such a way as to minimize setup times. If sheets or profiles are extruded one after the other with different dimensions, Fekor sorts the products in ascending or descending size and thus also avoids time-consuming set-up work.

Fekor solves the classic conflict in production planning between “reconciling” seemingly contradictory goals: It evaluates all cost-relevant factors at each individual step – personnel, machines and intermediate storage as well as productive and unproductive times – and thus minimizes the overall costs for operation. Priority is always given to ensuring that the promised delivery dates are met.

Production planning and materials management form a single unit in Fekor. In all planning steps and optimizations, the system checks all resources, the availability of personnel as well as material, aids and machines. In this way, the results of the optimization can actually be put into practice.

The new release works under Windows 7 and Oracle 11, and Access 2010 is used as the interface for data maintenance and analyses.