Implementing Distribution Requirement Planning and Scheduling System for Lens Manufacturing Company

The complexities of the planning and scheduling activities in a lens manufacturing company lie in considering the monthly forecast demand for thousands of Stock Keeping Unit (SKU), line & track loading preferences, minimum & maximum inventory coverage for the Distribution Center (DC), the lot & formation changes at the line, planned and unplanned downtime, diopter to track configuration, etc., making manual planning & scheduling very tedious and challenging. In this paper, an integrated Distribution Requirements Planning & Scheduling (DRPS) solution was proposed to address these challenges by mapping and decomposing the manual planning & scheduling activities into various integrated modules, consisting of Order Management, Planning & Planning Scheduling Engine, and Report and Data Integration modules. This solution is currently being used in the manufacturing plant and it acts as a platform for ‘what-if’ analysis for the evaluation of the demand fulfillment plan across the distribution centers considering the real operational constraints. It also improves the planner’s productivity by reducing the planning effort from 3 days/week to 2-3 hours/week and eliminating human error in the planning process.