Broner Metals Solutions

Broner Metals Solutions has released new versions of its Planning and Scheduling solutions that enable metal producers to achieve significant improvements in customer service.
The new enhancements span all Broner planning and scheduling modules, and include improvements to usability, response time, internal integration and optimisation technology. Together, these improvements are already helping Broner customers to increase on-time delivery and productivity while minimising inventories, costs and lead times.

Enhanced functionality in the new release includes:

World-class delivery performance requires collaboration between order promising, order planning, scheduling and manufacturing functions. The Broner APS and MES solution supports conformance measurement KPI's between all of the functions to ensure that their decision-making is synchronised. KPI's supported by the new Broner release includes:
- OTIF conformance - Percentage On-time Delivery in full.
- Plan Conformance - conformance of schedules to the production plan
- Schedule Conformance - Conformance of manufacturing to the schedule
The majority of scheduling is performed automatically by the Broner APS system. KPI conformance is automatically optimised in the planning and scheduling process. At times it is necessary to make manual adjustments to the automatically generated schedules, and Broner has made enhancements to these interactive scheduling functions to ensure the conformance KPI's are followed during manual scheduling.
With uncertainties about future costs of energy and the increasing concern about the environment, the need to increase the proportion of hot charging has become paramount for many more producers. Broner has made more enhancements to the Hot Charging capabilities of its Caster and Hot Mill Scheduling modules, which are yielding significant improvements in hot charge ratio.
Broner is continually working to improve the internal integration of its APS and MES modules. In this release several improvements have been made to improve the real-time re-scheduling based on actual production and quality results tracked by MES modules. A particular benefit of the Broner solutions is the live database, which provides real-time data to support rapid re-scheduling.
Long range scheduling has been improved by using additional pre-scheduling phases to balance the distribution of critical grades and sections across multiple campaigns/coffins.
Considerable performance improvements have been made to a number of Broner modules. They will allow users to better evaluate alternative planning and scheduling strategies to improve supply chain performance.

David Mushin, CEO of Broner Metals Solutions, said, "I am confident that these enhancements will help further strengthen Broner's position as the leading specialist in software solutions for the metals industry and will make a significant impact in improving customer service and planning operations for all types of metal producers."