Introduction
Factory Modeling is the process in which APS is designed to reflect the realities of a manufacturing environment. As a system built to reflect real life scheduling scenarios, varying categories of data are required, such as work order information, manufacturing execution data, and even items and inventories.
Key Concepts
The constituent data sets that comprise the factory model can be broken down into the three categories below:
Resource Objects: Resource Objects deal primarily with the physical setup of the manufacturing facility and will therefore consist of how machines and capital are organized into a tiered structure. Additionally, Resource Objects are meant to reflect the manufacturer’s capacity to do work and the type of work that can be done.
Item and Inventory Objects: Item and Inventory Objects pertain to the materials that both supply and are produced by the manufacturer. For example, Item and Inventory Objects will deal with not only raw and intermediate materials, but also SKU’s and the warehouses that stock them.
Job Objects: Job Objects refer to work order or production order information. Job Objects include not only the routing information for the products that need to be created, but a fair amount of business information which can include which customer ordered the product, in what quantity they ordered it, and when they need it. Where Resource Objects define what can be produced, Job Objects will ultimately inform the Resource Objects of should be produced on a given day.