"What-If" Scenarios in Project Management

PlanetTogether’s APS software is a powerful and effective tool for modeling your current plant setup. But what happens when you need to model theoretical expansion plans? Maybe you have a bottleneck that you’d like to get rid of. Maybe you recently expanded your plant, and now you’re curious about which machines would be the most effective. Or maybe you’d like to see what effect adding to your labor force would have. Through the use of “What-If” scenarios, PlanetTogether users can do just that.

Modeling A Resource

While working through a recent implementation, the PlanetTogether team was given an interesting task. “I need to add a machine,” the plant manager, John, stated, “but I need to prove that I need it. How can I add a copy of an existing machine to my shop floor, and, more importantly, how do I show the impact it will have on production?”

The circumstances weren’t complicated: there was a machine that was no longer being used by another plant, and it was the same model as one already on the shop floor, and John needed to be able to justify the shipping and setup costs. The PlanetTogether team dove in, and John was able to model this scenario in a matter of minutes.

"What-If" Scenarios are the First Step

Step one was to create a What-If Scenario, essentially, a copy of the current plant model and schedule (This is a simple one-click command.). Next, John copied the existing resource, and reviewed the capabilities, efficiency, and capacity of the newly created resource. Once that was done, all that was left was to click the Optimize button, and watch as the production orders rescheduled according to the newly defined resource capacity.

The model was set, the jobs were scheduled, but how do we see the impact? How do we prove that this model is actually effective? John got his answers from PlanetTogether’s built-in Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This allowed him to use these to compare their top stats: Late Jobs, Resource Utilization, and Daily Production (Units). John found the use of What-If scenarios and KPIs to be a powerful tool, easily showing the impact of adding his hypothetical resource to his plant. He shared the results with the management team and is expecting to make the investment next quarter.