In 2022, the annual inflation rate for the U.S. was 6.5%: a bit lower than the previous year, but still hovering around 40-year highs. And if you’ve talked with anyone about the cost of a dozen eggs lately, it’s clear that single-digit inflation number doesn’t really reflect the higher cost of many basic commodities. Egg …
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Tag Archives: Scheduling
Raw material shortages and chaotic supply chains can wreak havoc on manufacturing schedules and have planners scrambling for solutions. But with the right visibility into processes, schedulers can better assess how effectively production time is used, detect potential conflicts, and identify bottlenecks and constraints – and it can be a game changer. Profit Point recently …
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It is great to see progress in a relatively short amount of time. When I joined Profit Point in 2014, one of our key customers was scheduling their plants with AspenTech SCM, which is one of the most customizable scheduling tools, As we typically do, we complemented that flexibility with some of our own expertise; …
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The combination of Project Management and Teaching is how I got my start in Supply Chain. I had project management experience from my engineering career where I was designing, building, starting up and optimizing specialty chemical plants around the USA. In 2001, I was the Technical Manager for a plant in Charlotte, NC and I …
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In this case study, Profit Point’s client wanted to find a more automated and better way to create and maintain the production schedule across several batch reactors and schedulers. As a result, we engaged with the customer to design a production scheduling tool using Aspen Tech’s Aspen Plant SchedulerTM.
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Recently I was at an event where I knew the host and her family but not too many other people. As the guests introduced themselves to each other, the dreaded question came up. What do you do? I have come to dread this question. For the first part of my career, my answer was …
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Recently Mark Rockey posted a blog about the 5 characteristics of Advanced Production Scheduling Tools. Around the same time, I was asked by a client about the differences between SAP (PPDS) and Aspen Plant Scheduler (SCM/MIMI) and I thought this would be a good follow-up to Mark’s blog. Here is what we at Profit Point …
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There are many production scheduling tools available commercially. Some are more tailored to specific environments (such as a specific type of manufacturing) while others are applicable to a wide range of applications. When we talk about Advanced Production Scheduling Tools, there are certain characteristics that we have in mind including the following: 1) Both materials …
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At Profit Point, our consulting team has over a century of combined experience implementing Aspen Supply Chain Management (MIMI) solutions. Although the concepts for developing a model are similar from plant to plant, there is nothing quite like getting boots on the ground to truly understand the client needs. With that philosophy in mind, a …
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Frequently when we work with clients to implement decision support tools for supply chain scheduling and planning, they often have some unique constraint that is essential to model and may be unique to their environment. Some recent examples we have encountered include the following: When producing a batch in a make to order environment, the …
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My day started out ordinary: Tea, checking emails, and weekly team meeting. Little did I know that I was in store for some mystery, detours, and redemption. It all started with a few email requests at the beginning of my day.
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For years we’ve been hearing about Big Data. Now the call is to make the data visible and actionable. Easier said than done. Remember when we wanted our music, phone and camera on one device instead of having to carry multiple devices? Data Visualization is that desirable right now and it is challenging to do …
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