DELMIA ORTEMs Part 3

GD: Obviously, narrowing our focus a bit to the very specific piece of software at hand, which is, DELMIA ORTEMs and APRISO. Obviously, D4M is in the industry of digital manufacturing and, when it comes to products, virtualization can greatly help that, we are a much smaller scale operation – more often than not, focusing on (just as you mentioned before) the practical, real-world planning of so forth

GD:. For the uninitiated, what exactly is Delmia ORTEMs?

Adrian: Yeah, DELMIA ORTEMs is part of our planning and optimization discipline if you like. It is a finite capacity scheduling application that allows (generally within the 4 walls of a manufacturing facility where you might have a job shop or assembly line or production line) the effective scheduling of operations for the orders and products have been made on those production lines down to the minutes.

Adrian: In terms of planning scope, ORTEMs is typically used to plan out the next few weeks or down to the day; so, you might have the most effectively designed production line, that you can possibly get with the best technology, advanced machinery, etc. But, the bottom line is – when you start getting orders – you need to plan the sequence of events for those orders as efficiently as you can to minimize changeover times and all the wonderful things that happen when you start actually running production/fulfilling demand through your production assembly operations.

Adrian: ORTEMs is, in a nutshell, a tool that very effectively develops optimized sequence of events to meet that demand at the best possible in the best possible way, according to your KPIs.

GD: And, just because I get the various terminology confused, ORTEMS is an MES software with a with the potential of using APS functionalities, is that correct?

Adrian: Not quite. So, ORTEMs does not actually have any MES capability – also known as “manufacturing execution systems” capability; that’s Delmia APRISO.

Adrian:. ORTEMs basically says, “here’s how we’re going to make, what we need to in what order over the next day or week or a couple of weeks” and APRISO then executes that.

GD: Is that inherent in its APS capabilities, or is APS something an add on that is entirely different?

Adrian: Yeah, the terminology APS, Advanced Planning and Scheduling, is a somewhat of a generic industry term that’s been used for the capabilities that plan the sequence of events or plan that the production sequence; but, that’s where APS stops. The output of the APS or DELMIA ORTEMs might be to push the sequence of events and the required material capability and whatever back to the ERP system – as a system of record.

Adrian: But then, the MES system (or “manufacturing operations management” solutions like Delmia APRISO) would be the one that say “now, I know what’s going to occur in the sequence of events in the schedule; now, I need to execute against that”.

Adrian: That’s where the connection is between an APS system or a planning system like DELMIA ORTEMs, figure out what to do/when so then the manufacturing execution system (or the mom system for DELMIA APRISO) would say, “okay, now here’s how I’m going to instruct the workers and the machinery to actually execute that schedule”

GD: Something else that I’ve been reading a lot about is this concept of collaboration within the DELMIA software suite.

GD: How exactly does ORTEMs and it’s various planning procedures allow for or facilitate this sort of collaboration?

Adrian: Like any planning process or execution process, there’s a lot of different stakeholders involved in actually executing or developing that plan.

Adrian: And so, DELMIA ORTEMs – like pretty much all of the Dassault applications that we bring to market – have this collaborative ability to connect different people who might be involved in the processes such as: what orders are we going to need to fulfill? What’s the state of our schedules of our shop floor? What’s is the availability of material?

Adrian: So, all of these different stakeholders have a piece to play in developing that schedule; and ORTEMS understands that. And so, you have different roles that can interact with the schedule; the scheduler themselves, the people on the shop floor that need to see what the schedule is and what they’re, going to do, etc. And so, the collaborative environment allows those people to work from a single set of data.

Adrian: Remember, most companies who have not yet reached the level of automation or have used these sort of tools – and there are a lot of them – are still planning using spreadsheets or manual process or, the big, 10 foot long, Gantt charts on a whiteboard still exists for many companies who are trying to schedule manually! And so, of course, if you’re sending spreadsheets by email between the different stakeholders, that information is out of date as soon as you send it! A spreadsheet IS NOT a living, breathing sort of source of information.

Adrian: And so, the other key aspect of this collaboration is that everyone that’s involved in developing that schedule looks at the same view – the same set of data, a single version of the truth. It’s tremendously difficult to manage that when you don’t have a system that allows this sort of collaboration around a single consensus plan versus spreadsheets going back and forth on email.

Adrian: So that’s really what you were you might see, or you might hear about when they talk about the collaboration is allowing all the different stakeholders as part of the manufacturing scheduling process to see and work from a single version of the truth.

GD: Just out of curiosity, I know that the installation APRISO does not necessarily need to be installed in every plant within one organization. Does ORTEMS work in a similar way?

Adrian: When you say it doesn’t have to be installed, if you don’t have a scheduling problem, then, of course, you don’t need a scheduling solution.

Adrian: But typically, when you think about different types of planning, you obviously have strategic sort of planning – like sales and operations, planning, master production, scheduling, master production, planning – those typically work across multiple facilities and plants. Those pieces of planning software are trying to solve a planning problem that exists across the entire supply chain.

Adrian: When we think of DELMIA APRISO and DELMIA ORTEMs, they’re typically applied within the four walls of a facility – usually, meaning one manufacturing facility. Typically, if you’re looking for the ability to do effective planning, scheduling, and effective manufacturing execution, you would have a version of DELMIA ORTEMs implemented and a version of DELMIA APRISO implemented for that one site.

Adrian: Now, obviously, many companies have multiple manufacturing facilities; so, you might have that same set up replicated across different facilities as well.