Opcenter AS Professional

End-to-end visibility with the Material Explorer

Opcenter AS Professional provides several additional features that help optimise the schedule and improve the visual experience for the user. AS Professional boasts rules that deal with minimising changeover times and provides a varied selection of preferred sequences for scheduling. The inclusion of the campaigning rule further adds to the scheduling power of AS Professional.

One of the major additional features in AS Professional is the inclusion of the Material Explorer. This provides the user with an interactive graphical interface which displays the relationships between works orders, purchase orders and stock. Material shortages and surplus are displayed and the user can then travel along the entire material supply chain to examine where problems occur. Whilst Opcenter does not perform any kind of MRP calculation, the Material explorer is able to sanity check MRP calculations and provides the user with a clear picture of where material supply issues occur.

Minimise changeovers with the preferred sequence rule

Opcenter AS Professional presents the user with the ability to schedule with increased complexity. Included in AS Professional is the capability to model advanced operation constraints. These were originally created when Opcenter progressed into fast moving consumer goods where liquids, natural and granular products were passed between resources. Such complex constraints can include limits on the time allowed between operations, how much processing times can be extended (due to running across shifts) and the ability to reset subsequent resource usage.

AS Professional allows the user to take advantage of the Preferred Sequence feature within the APS Rules. These type of rules form the basis of advanced sequencing logic as they consider the resource and not the operation as the focus for determining the sequence. These rules move towards increasing production efficiency by minimising changeovers but can compromise on time delivery performance.

You can also visit the Siemens website to read about Opcenter APS here.

Feature List:

• ‘Order at a Time’ scheduling
• Table and Field renaming
• User definable interface
• File-based import & export
• 20 Customisable spare fields
• Flexible order routing
• Links to ODBC data source
• Mid-Batch updating with recalculation
• Full sequence dependent attribute-based setup times
• A set of standard advanced planning rules
• Material consumption and production at operation level
• Custom material linking rules

• Multi-constraint scheduling (primary, secondary and materials)
• Material consumption at order level
• FIFO Material linking rule
• Attribute-based simple setup times
• Order Enquiry
• Transfer Batching and Slack times
• Opcenter workflow (PESP) with custom actions to run external code
• Opcenter workflow (PESP) scheduling actions for multi-pass rules
• Material Explorer for material data visualisation
• Advanced resource constraints to model complex concurrent resource usage
• Advanced operation constraints for complex inter-operation relationships
• Exclude invalid resources based on attribute

Potential Benefits: