Analytics & Optimization for Manufacturing

Accelerate time to value with the most comprehensive and tailored optimization solution to navigate complex trade-offs, manage risk, and achieve complex business objectives.

“Using advanced analytics to manage the supply chain and reduce costs has become imperative. FICO has been critical to the optimization needs at Nestlé USA.”

- Shan Collins, Vice President of Planning & Center of Excellence, Nestlé USA

Solution Details

Although many of the problems manufacturers need to solve are the same ones their predecessors struggled with decades ago, changes in global economics and buyer behaviors continually introduce significant amounts of new problems and complexities that manufacturing leaders are forced to address.

In order to find ways to do more with less, in less time, for the ideal balance of costs, throughput, and timeliness, innovative manufacturers have put increased focus on the ability to:

Tailor solutions to meet specific business criteria unique from individual production lines all the way to global manufacturing systems
Speed deployment of end-user applications
Manage constant change

The ability to rapidly convert different types of data into insights and action is the key point of transformation for manufacturers trying to strike the right balance between inputs, outputs, business objectives, compliance, and ultimately customer demand and preferences.

FICO® Manufacturing Solver, one of several Xpress Insight solutions available, is a pre-configured framework that accelerates time to value. With the most comprehensive and tailored machine learning and optimization algorithms, users are able to navigate complex trade-offs, manage risk, and achieve complex business objectives for multi-modal, multi-echelon manufacturing and distribution networks.

FICO Manufacturing Solver helps businesses:

Increase controllable operating margins
Solve the toughest optimization problems to balance the trade-offs between costs, throughput, and timeliness
Augment business user acumen by putting solutions directly into the hands of those who need them
Leverage existing technology investments with complementary tailored solutions

Additional complementary Xpress Insight solutions include FICO® Supply Chain Solver, FICO® Forecaster, and FICO® Vehicle Routing Planner, as well as build-your-own.

Use Cases

Planning, forecasting and scheduling

Close the “forecasting gap” with broader data, faster analytic results and smarter decisions

Using advanced analytics, such as machine learning and explainable AI, you can go beyond traditional forecasting inputs to weigh a wider range of data for more accurate and dynamic projections of demand, planning production capacity and supply flows accordingly. Simulation and optimization let you rapidly explore any number of demand scenarios to improve long-term capital planning and short-term tactical planning. Scheduling optimization balances myriad factors, including goals like accelerating fulfillment to priority customers, improving overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), reducing safety stock and widening margins, to recommend the current best schedules.

Streaming data analytic platform
Business rules management system
Machine learning and explainable AI
Workforce scheduling
Scheduling optimization

Logistics and supply chain optimization

Ensure resources and capacity are where you need them when you need them

With more accurate demand forecasts as inputs, along with data from production and suppliers, supply chain optimization recommends the most efficient part and component inventory levels. Use it with simulation to develop tactical sourcing strategies for handling spikes in demand or coping with supply chain disruptions. Optimization can also be applied to other complexities of supply chain management, including logistics concerns such as warehouse dock door scheduling, transportation network design and production facility location.

Inventory optimization
Component transfer analysis
Supply network optimization
Vendor contract management and performance analysis
Rapid design/deploy of mobile analytics-driven apps

Production management

Improve quality, reduce costs, increase customization capabilities and optimize resource utilization

Manufacturing ERP systems gain agility when you use them with an external rules service. Without need for IT assistance, your business experts can easily set up rules-driven routines to accelerate complex, repetitive tasks, like updating material master lists and validating orders at the detailed level of component configurations. Streamlining such tasks reduces production delays, rework and scrap while facilitating custom factory builds.

Business rules automation and management
Streaming data analytic platform
Machine learning and explainable AI
Production scheduling optimization
Rapid design/deploy of mobile analytics-driven apps

Equipment diagnostic

Reduce downtime through predictive asset maintenance

Decision rules add intelligence to diagnostics systems, reducing time-to-identification of the root causes of production problems. Analytic models identify machines that are outliers in terms of expected ranges of production, speed or energy consumption — triggering maintenance intervention before failures occur. Machine learning can analyze a wide variety of factory data for insights — like relationships between humidity and machine energy consumption — that point to improvement opportunities.

Streaming data analytic platform
Business rules management system
Machine learning and explainable AI

Distribution

Get products to customers with less spend, more speed

Optimization can identify the best choices among several million routing options in seconds. In fact, optimization, along with rules-driven automation and other advanced analytics, can help you make better decisions about all of the interrelated complexities of product fulfillment: container types, load building, carrier selection, truck load allocation, route assignment and more.