The system presented by the Russian vendor is capable of replacing foreign peers used by metallurgical plants.
Moscow, October 17, 2022. The results of a pilot project during which GoodsForecast.Supply Planning, a component of the GoodsForecast.Supply Planning integrated planning platform for production planning and optimization (S&OP), was tested as a potential replacement for the current SAP APO SNP solution in one of major industrial holdings operating in ferrous metallurgy, have been summarized.
By retaining a Western solution without support and updates, the group would risk stopping the development of processes and losing the required interrelation between its production plans, financial targets and indicators. In order to preserve the manageability of output and business as a whole and to ensure the possibility of further development of business processes, the option for replacing the currently used planning system with a domestic analog that is not inferior in quality, functionality and performance is being considered.
GoodsForecast’s team was invited to create a prototype based on a fully domestic solution because it could offer all the necessary functionality, has established itself as a developer of efficient and high-performance mathematical algorithms and is the only integrated planning solution provider in Russia that has its own solver (optimizer).
The SAP APO SNP planning model currently used by the enterprise was used to create the prototype with a full data set of more than 3,000 material specifications produced on 79 lines/units. It takes only about 15–16 seconds for a regular PC to calculate a full model once ported to the GoodsForecast platform. Such high performance allows comfortably handling multiple plan recalculations and perform a scenario analysis, taking into account changes in demand forecasts, maintenance schedules, various raw material supply options and many other parameters and finally select the most appropriate option.
In addition to mid-term or tactical planning processes with a 12–24 months’ horizon that combine demand planning, S&OP and supply chain planning/optimization, GoodsForecast's integrated planning platform also addresses the processing or heavy industries’ enterprises for operational production, supply chain scheduling, creating optimal output schedules, optimizing and managing inventories and handling other management tasks
The GoodsForecast solution for optimizing output planning is already well established in the pulp and paper, electrical, wood and food industries. It is a mature solution that requires little refinement and customization during implementation and can scale and evolve to meet the changing requirements and business processes of enterprises. Additional datasets, functional modules, new rules and constraints can be added to the solution.
“We have done a lot of development work over the previous years and have accumulated good expertise in various segments of the industrial sector. Moreover, we were successfully competing with Western vendors even before they left the market. Metallurgy is a relatively new industry for us, so it is especially important for us to see that based on the pilot results our planning optimizer has met the customer's expectations,” Sergey Kotik, GoodForecast’s Development Director, commented.