PLANVAR | Planning for Variability in Manufacturing Companies

The PLANVAR project supports manufacturing companies in rethinking their planning and production management by showing how recently acquired knowledge can be applied. This will enable manufacturing companies to plan complex environments with less effort while using existing or affordable tools, and so further increase their productivity and reliability of delivery. 

Context 

More than 70 percent of high-mix-low-volume manufacturing companies report struggling with planning and managing production. This translates into all kinds of problems that hinder performance and productivity, such as excessive planning and replanning work, chaos on the work floor, low delivery reliability and dissatisfied customers.

More specifically, there are two challenges:

• Manufacturing companies are faced with increasing demand variability (fluctuations in mix and volume) and production variability (complex routings, small and large orders, uncertain times, etc.) in their environment, as a result of which their current planning approach no longer works. 
• Manufacturers want to be able to effortlessly plan and manage their production with minimal effort using existing or affordable tools.

Purpose

The PLANVAR project supports manufacturing industry in rethinking its planning and production management by showing how recently acquired knowledge can be applied. This will enable manufacturing companies to plan complex environments with less effort while using existing or affordable tools, and so further increase their productivity and reliability of delivery. 

This project starts from new insights developed from academic and practical research at leading companies (for example, from previous joint research projects, ICON projects and international research). These insights are sufficiently mature to be applied but still require translation research before they can be fully accepted. 

The PLANVAR has two concrete goals:

1. Translate principles of planning for variability into useful planning methods that minimise the planning effort for the target group.
2. Support and accelerate the adoption and implementation of the principles and methods in an SME manufacturing environment.

The aim is to have achieved the following results two years after the start of the project:

• A state-of-the-art overview document linked to 10 presentations, publications and videos.
• A manual of the validated planning methodology (planning rules, practical calculation models for parameterisation, visualisation tool, etc.).
• An interactive planning game linked to workshops and broad dissemination events. 
• Three workshops on 'planning for variability for high-mix-low-volume companies'.
• An assessment tool, a set of IT configuration guidelines and an implementation schedule with a step-by-step plan to resolve various practical issues.

Target group

The target group of the project comprises two subgroups: about 500 Flemish manufacturing companies (of which more than 80 percent are SMEs) that operate in a high-mix-low-volume context and about 40 integrators and suppliers of planning tools.