The previous sections made clear that multi-project planning provides insight in the progress of multiple projects and the corresponding utilization of resources. This insight can be used as decision aid for stakeholders. Interaction and integration between different departments and levels of control is required to implement multi-project planning successfully throughout the entire organization.
4.4.1 Design of the tactical planning meeting
Section 4.1.3 explained that there is no interaction with the tactical planning level. We therefore suggest to start a tactical planning meeting that should play a crucial integrative role between different departments and the strategic and operational level respectively. We design the information flow for this meeting. The purpose of the meeting is to gather the required input data for multi-project planning, establish lead times for incoming projects and discuss the possibility to accept more orders based on the current resource utilization. We explain the information flow and the progression of the meeting, the frequency and decisions made during this meeting.
Design, frequency and decisions
Figure 4.8 shows the information flow of the meeting, based on provided information in Table IV.1 in Appendix IV.
The planning horizon of the tactical high level is 12 months. We therefore suggest to organize this meeting every month. The meeting should proceed as follows. The tactical planner(s) should provide a multi-project view during the meeting with actual status of running projects. The overview should be based on actual information of already required orders in combination with a demand forecast for the entire planning horizon. Based upon the sales forecast the tactical planner should give insight in the load profiles, utilization for the different resource groups.
The sales department should provide actual information regarding incoming production orders. The manager of the operations and engineering department provide insight regarding the actual resource utilization.
The tactical planner uses the actual information to refresh the multi-project view for the next meeting and is able to provide advice to the salesmen on order acceptance or rejection of the new incoming orders. The managers of the engineering and assembly department are able to make decisions regarding temporal capacity expansions.
Figure 4.8: Information flow during the tactical planning meeting
4.4.2 Interaction with other levels of control
The previous section mainly explained the horizontal interaction with other business units. However, vertical integration is also important for enrolling multi-project planning successfully. We explain our suggestions for the interaction for the strategic and operational planning level respectively.
Strategic planning level
The managing director is the stakeholder that is responsible to interact with the board of directors at the strategic planning level. The managing director should announce the target order intake for AWL NL during the tactical meeting. Based upon the actual performance of the production system, the managing director is responsible for providing feedback to the board of directors. We suggest that the managing director should exchange the following information to the board of directors at the strategic level:
The actual order intake per segment YTD (i.e. body, seating or special) The sales forecast for the entire planning horizon of the tactical high level The utilization of the engineering and assembly department
After exchanging this information for three months, the board of directors summarize this information and base the quartile update upon this information. By doing so, the output of the tactical planning meeting functions as input for the quartile update.
Operational planning level
The managers of the engineering and operations department are responsible for the interaction with the operational offline level. Both managers are responsible for sharing the obtained information with the team leaders and operational planners of the engineering and assembly department. We suggest exchanging the following information:
For the operational offline horizon (2 – 8 weeks): Per incoming order:
o Segment of order (i.e. body, seating or special)
o Machine type (arc welding, laser welding, spot welding) o Customer due date of the order
o Proposed start- and completion time of aggregated engineering activities o Proposed start- and completion time of the aggregated assembly activities o Estimation of required capacity per resource group
This information should function as input for the operational weekly meeting. The frequent exchange of information should integrate the managerial areas and the different levels of control. We expect that this information exchange results in a production system that is better prepared for incoming orders. At the end, this will result in less ‘fire-fighting’ of operational managers, team leaders and operational planners at AWL.
4.5 Conclusion
This chapter showed a practical application of the hierarchical planning framework of Hans et al. (2005). This chapter emphasized the following aspects:
We applied the current situation of AWL on the hierarchical planning framework of Hans et al. (2005).
We identified absent planning functions and concluded that the tactical planning level is poorly addressed by AWL.
We redesigned the content of the planning framework tailored for AWL. We zoomed in on the multi-project planning function for AWL.
o We explained what multi-project planning should look like for AWL. o We explained the required input and output data.
o We explained how the interaction between departments and different planning levels of control should look like.
o We introduces a tactical planning meeting and explained the information flow and progression of this meeting.
First, we applied the current situation of AWL and showed the content of the planning framework in Section 4.1. Based on this view, we were able to identify absent planning functions. We concluded that the tactical level is currently poorly addressed by AWL.
Roadmap towards improvement
This chapter constructs a step-by-step implementation plan for multi-project planning at AWL. The first step is gathering the required planning data, which is the focus of Section 5.1. In Section 5.2 we concentrate on the second step: the required organizational changes. The last step is software support. In Section 5.3 explains how software should support the tactical planning function. This section describes the software requirements and verifies whether the current planning tool: MS projects, is able to meet those requirements. Paragraph 5.4 gives a recommendation regarding a tactical planning algorithm.