Since standard software was invented in the 1970's, software vendors strived to enrich the functionality of their products in order to cover a growing amount of customer requirements.  Unfortunately, the added functionality also increased the complexity of the software, and implementations became long and costly endeavours that required in-depth knowledge across the entire functionality of a product.  More importantly, the focus of consultants shifted away from industry expertise to software functionality knowledge.

The verticalization of software tries to overcome this issue.  Standard functionality is expressed in the language of the respective industry, and previously common functionality is removed from verticals where it is not applicable, thus removing unnecessary complexity.  While verticalization has been a key theme for vendors in the ERP segment, the efforts in the Supply Chain Planning software are limited to date.

Synopsis Consulting developed industry-specific toolkits for Supply Chain Planning in order to let our clients benefit from the industry experience we gathered over the years, resulting in

• Faster, less costly and more adaptive implementations
• No need to learn software terminology, our toolkits are written in your industry's language
• Specific solutions to industry-specific problems that are not available within the standard software

While about half the content of our toolkits is software agnostic, we developed special enhancement to Oracle's Supply Chain Planning products (formerly J.D. Edwards).  These enhancements are not available from Oracle direct and are the sole property and exclusively maintained by Synopsis Consulting, Inc. 

Semiconductor Toolkit

Our Semiconductor Toolkit is based on Oracle's Strategic Network Optimization (SNO) product and includes the following Supply Chain components.

• Fabrication
• Die Bank
• Assembly
• Testing
• Die to Finished Good conversion

Any of the entities above can be configured to be either company-owned or outsourced.  In both cases, suggestions are based on capacities, lead times and manufacturing/purchasing as well as transportation costs.  Wafer-to-die conversions, yield losses and grouping by leadframes are standard functionality.

The solution encompasses the following functionality:

• Visibility of actual and predicted inventories across the entire Supply Chain
• Wafer buy and/or production suggestions
• Demand based pull signals from the die bank
• Assignment of assembly quantities across multiple assembly facilities
• Testing processes with yield loss optional at any point of the supply chain
• Optional die to finished goods conversion
  

You know exactly what we are talking about, but we are missing an important process of your company's supply chain?  Remember the last time you looked at a blue print of standard software, could you have concluded to which extent it covers your needs?  Let us know about your requirement, and we guarantee you it will take us only a few moments to figure out whether it is included in the standard, we can incorporate it, or we will have to find an alternative solution.  Sounds encouraging?  Contact us!

Biotech/Pharma/Medical Devices Toolkit

Our Health Care Toolkit enables us to model a variety of different planning scenarios along the following three corner stones:

• Global Biotech/Pharmaceutical
• Regional Medical Devices
• Multi-Country Packaging

The Global Pharmaceutical solution is a perfect fit for companies that need to synchronize production, manufacturing and packaging activities world-wide, enabling them to

• Gain global cost, lead-time and inventory visibility
• Simulate production ramp-ups and new filings
• React to product losses with minimal disruption to key markets

Characteristic for the Regional Medical Devices solution is the link into lean/flow manufacturing principles and its tactical planning nature.  It allows companies that have a variety of purchasing, outsourcing as well as internal assembly processes to manage their complex supply chain cost effective and capacity efficient.  A key feature of the solution is the ability to determine how to best utilize available capacity during the beginning of a month when the order volume is only a fraction of the forecast.

While the previous solutions were developed using Oracle's Strategic Network Optimization (SNO) product, the Multi-Country Packaging solution is based on Oracle's Production Scheduling products (PS or PS-P).  It is a perfect fit for companies that package hundreds of different products for different markets and sequences manual, semi-automatic as well as automatic packaging lines in parallel.  By optimizing personnel as well as change-over times the resulting schedules demonstrate high capacity utilization, planning stability and reduced lead-times.

Due to the wide range of manufacturing and distribution aspects within the health care sector it is likely that your company can benefit not from a single but a combination of our toolkits.  Contact us, we are happy to discuss the details with you!

Chemical Industry Toolkit

Our Chemical Industry Toolkit consists of two similar solutions with different focus.

The first solution was designed to facilitate multi-national production with quality and transportation lead time considerations.  It balances production and distribution aspects of the supply chain in order to determine a global product mix that maximizes overall capacity at mimimum costs, taking the following variables into consideration.

• Lead times 
• Transportation costs and duties
• Multi-tier distribution networks
• Batch sizes and campaing runs
• Production capabilities and costs

The focus of the second solution is the determination of the actual runs and campaigns, together with the optimal utilization of the distribution network once the product mix has been established.   Under certain circumstances, this solution can be extended to incorporate the determination of the product mix, and hence cover tactical as well as strategic planning aspects.

To find out which solution is best suited for your company, and if we are able to combine the strategic and tactical implementations into one, please contact us.

Corrugated Packaging Toolkit

Our Corrugated Packaging Toolkit consist of the following two complementary solutions.

• Paper Mill Optimization
• Packaging Plant Optimization

The focus of the mill solution is the determination of an optimized block schedule across multiple mills.  Built on Oracle's Strategic Network Optimization (SNO) product together with the Enterprise Trim Optimization (ETO) add-on, it takes the following criteria into consideration.

• Min/max deckel (master roll) width
• Grade range
• Production speed and costs
• Transportation costs

It establishes trim patterns based on aggregated roll demand in order to compute the optimzed block schedule but is not intended to be used to schedule actual production orders.  The computation of an optimzed block schedule itself can increase the overall capacity of the network significantly while at the same time lowering costs and has lead to million-dollar savings per year in previous implementations.

The Box Plant solution optimizes the assignment of customers or customer orders to plants.  Using a sophisticated method it determines where which orders can be run most efficiently and offsets the production costs with the transporation costs.  The framework to define the capabilities of the different plants as well as the transporation costs is elegant and flexible at the same time, please contact us for more details.