|
SIMCAP® Frequently Asked Questions
|
Here are some of the questions people often ask us about capacity management and SIMCAP® From a Laboratory Manager: '..The problem I have is that my analysts have other duties that I must provide time for other than testing product. How can I provide for this when I am assessing capacity?...' SIMCAP® can handle this in two ways. In SIMCAP® you can create an analyst specific calendar that allows you to divide their time up between their various duties. Secondly SIMCAP® has the capability to add in these additional duties and the time it takes to do them into the planned work for the lab or analysts and both the product testing and the additional duties planning can be integrated '..The work I carry out in the Lab is a mixture of test equipment based and manual (analyst) based testing, which one do I need to manage?....' The area that needs to be managed is the rate limiting (bottleneck) part of the testing. In practice SIMCAP® can help you identify which part is the rate limiting activity by allowing you to set up both your automated and the manual parts of your testing. By doing this you can manage the bottleneck activities while monitoring the other ones in the background. From a Planning Manager: '.... A critical factor in our planning process is the number of batches that we do in a campaign. Often our customers order quantities that are less than our costed campaign size and this causes us to be inefficient and use more capacity due to changeovers. How is this handled?...' SIMCAP® allows for both the optimum campaign size and the minimum order quantity to be set within it's master data. Once these are set SIMCAP® visually flags any orders or requirements that are below these levels using simple colour coding. This allows the planning staff to decide what decisions to make quickly. In addition SIMCAP® has functionality to allow you to optimise your campaign sizes at the press of a button in order to allow you to quickly see if there are utilisation benefits from doing this. '....We are operating in at almost 100% utilisation in some of our critical workcentres. Last year we needed to go on 4 cycle shift and to do this we took a shift off another workcentre that was under utilised. This caused us problems as the bottleneck moved to the other workcentre, How would SIMCAP® handle this?...' This scenario could be very quickly analysed in SIMCAP® by simply reducing the shift pattern to 2 cycles in the workcentre that you were taking the shift team from for the required period. SIMCAP® would automatically recalculate the load on the workcentre and allow you to see if this was a feasible solution
For more information about SIMCAP® contact SIMCAP@profile-sol.com
|
|
