Implementing Advanced Distribution Requirement Planning and Scheduling System (DRPS) for Lens Manufacturing Company

Lens manufacturing companies face challenges in performing their planning and scheduling activities due to the complexity of matching the demand with the available capacity, due to the operational constraints in the production lines, including the formation change to minimize product changeover, fulfillment of high and low demand Stock Keeping Units, configuration of negative/positive diopters to lines, planned and unplanned downtime etc., making manual planning & scheduling very challenging. Most of the current planning and production scheduling practices are manual and Excel-based and it involves heavy planning efforts with high human error rates. In this paper, Advanced Distribution Requirements Planning & Scheduling (DRPS) is unveiled to address the challenges plaguing manual planning and scheduling within a lens manufacturing company. Unlike traditional approaches, DRPS meticulously dissects planning and scheduling activities into unique functions including Demand Management, Requirement Planning, Scheduling Engine, and Reporting. After implementing the DRPS system, there were significant improvements (50% to 88%) in various key performance indicators and the planners were able to perform what-if analysis under different operation scenarios and the entire manual planning & scheduling process was digitalized and automated