Manage Campaigns

The setup times to switch between producing one product and another are so extreme for some manufacturers that they need to plan on grouping similar orders together, or to ensure a particular progression of one product type to another (that is, light to dark colors, wide to narrow widths.) Master Production Scheduling supports Campaign management to satisfy this requirement.

Campaigns are a mechanism for grouping operations of similar products on a machine to minimize the set-up times and ensure the efficient use of bottleneck resources. Campaigns are dedicated moments in time when certain type of operations can be produced. Typical examples for campaigns are the painting operations where similar colors are grouped. For certain machines, campaigns constitute 100% of the total production times, for others it might be only a part of the time.

Campaigns for the Standard Resources can be exclusive or not. Exclusive means that the campaign is only allowed to produce the products that match the campaign, no other products are allowed during this period.

Users create, edit, and delete campaigns from the Campaign Overview. From this view the associations between Standard Resources, Campaign Types and Campaigns are presented in parent-child forms. Planners can visualize campaign timelines on a Gantt chart, from which they can drill down on work order details assigned to a specific campaign.

In addition, campaigns are also visualized on all capacity-related Gantt charts such as the Resource Capacity Overview view where campaign timelines and utilization are displayed.