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Purpose

Epicycles provides Planning and Scheduling Systems for Process Industries. Its also very relevant to Manufacturing.

There is typically a misfit between the functionality available for Materials, Capacity and Distribution Requirements Planning provided in Enterprise Resource Planning Systems and the Planning and Scheduling needs of Process Industries.

Process Industries have some of the following characteristics:-

Process Industry Characteristics
  • Spectrum of 24 x 7 continuous operation to intermittent batch processing.
  • All flavours of Make to Stock and Make to Order simultaneously
  • Mixture of firm orders and make to stock at any stage of planning
  • Any Shape Bills Of Materials (Normal, Inverted, "V", "X", "W", etc.)
  • Recycled materials
  • Recipes dependent on Raw Materials Availability (Blending etc.)
  • Interdependence of Products, By-Products, Co-Products
  
  • Engineered Bottlenecks with known (finite) throughput
  • Capacity in engineering units eg tonnes / hour or litres / second rather than hours
  • Continuous Rolling Planning Horizon 
  • Production Sequencing at any stage of Planning
  • Mixed lot size spectrum of Continuous, through Bulk and Small Batch Shipments
  • Multiple companies, time zones, production sites, transport modes
The characteristics are indicative of the different requirements for Planning and Scheduling systems.

There is also a well documented misfit between Materials Requirements Planning and the general needs of Just In Time Lean Manufacturing.

Epicycles has redesigned Scheduling and Planning Systems from fundamental principles to support Process Industries and Just In Time Materials Management. Make it as Lean as you like.

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