Usiminas optimizes their production with PSImetals Planning

The PSImetals Sales and Operations Planning process commonly indicates, based on a combination of actual and forecast demands, what should be a company’s sales plan to increase its financial results based on the constraints of an existing installed operational capacity. Also on the operations level it helps on defining maintenance plans, campaigns for producing similar materials in certain lines, and the requirements of shifts operations (modus operandi). Moreover, it can be used in longer terms to identify where to invest for removing the production bottlenecks.

The situation prior to the project was that Usiminas was using Microsoft Excel in order to create both the S&OP and the PSImetals Flow and Order Planning. The Excel files contained multiple ‘macros’ developed using Visual Basic which were difficult to use, maintain and modify.

Carrying out the S&OP in Excel spreadsheets was very time consuming. The elaboration of one monthly plan was typically lasting for over a week, and by the time the plan was ready most conditions had already changed and the plan could already be obsolete.

In addition, the plan being produced would not consider both sites simultaneously for processing the combined demand, and therefore would not consider the alternativeness between these sites.

The PSImetals S&OP solution was implemented in a single instance for producing monthly plans for a horizon comprising the 5 upcoming months. With the PSImetals S&OP solution, Usiminas now has one system covering the 2 sites and producing an integrated plan in around 3 minutes, allowing for simulations of multiple scenarios, and ensuring collaborative management and control of the monthly Sales and Operations Planning process.

According to Rodrigo Brentegani, IT Project Manager from Usiminas:

Before we implemented the PSImetals Solution, we had tried other solutions but they did not satisfy our production needs as we needed over 24 hours to run the sales and operation plans. With the PSImetals Sales and Operations component, we take just a few minutes and we can try different scenarios. Even though we are still learning how to use the solution, so far, we are satisfied with its performance.

The operational plan is typically elaborated to determine when materials and orders will be processed and through which resources, and therefore provide a more detailed visibility of when orders will be delivered, how resources are being utilized, and how the levels of stocks are evolving over time.

The PSImetals Planning solution implemented for Usiminas has the following characteristics:

• A daily plan is produced individually for each site, for the entire order book, which typically would imply on a detailed plan for approximately 40 days;
• The solution was also migrated from Microsoft Excel to a robust and configurable supply chain planning model;
• The master data (productivity, yields, routes, equipment, calendar, efficiency, constraints, etc) is shared between the monthly S&OP and the daily plan, ensuring consistency of data and results
• Also outputs from both the S&OP and Daily plans are shared between each other for consistency between the different planning levels
• The plan is considering each piece of material individually, and although this implies on a very high level of detail, each plan takes less than 10 minutes to be produced, so various simulations and scenarios can be created on an ‘ad hoc’ basis. Here the decision of making separate instances for Ipatinga and Cubatão proved to be very important;