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Posts Tagged ‘Forecasting’

Is SAP PLM for Real?

Posted in PLM, SAP, SPP, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 21, 2009 | 4 Comments »

Pushing SAP PLM
For some time SAP has been promoting its product lifecycle management (PLM) solution. We should say at the outset that we don’t find the term PLM very useful. Yes there are lifecycle implications to the software, however this category of software could more accurately be described as bill of material management software. However, [...]

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BOM and MTBF and Product Structure

Posted in Arena Solutions, MTBF, Master Data, PLM, SAP, SPP, Service Parts Database, tagged , , , , on December 9, 2008 | 2 Comments »

MTBF and the Product Structure
In our previous post we discussed the different vendors and services offered for reliability testing and prediction. One of the important issues with relation to MTBF management is the product structure. The product structure is the hierarchy (or at least at first glance) of materials that make up an overall product. [...]

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Forecasting in MCA

Posted in MCA, MTBF, tagged , , on April 7, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Different Approaches
There are several different approaches to generating the forecast in MCA SPO. Each Location-Part combination can be configured to follow one of these approaches:

Computed: Based upon historical demand and leading indicators such as causals and installed population. Blends the history based and causal forecasts. The blending of these two forecast streams is called composite [...]

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Sampling of Important MCA Parameters for Service Parts Planning

Posted in Inventory Optimization, MCA, tagged , , , on April 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

MCA Parameters
Parameters control the model. They can be changed in the UI or directly in the tables. Parameters are stored in two tables: PARAMETERS and FLAGS. Not all the parameters fields are listed below, just some very interesting ones.
The PARAMETERS Table

Fiscal Year Planning Periods (default 12)
Number of Years History (default 2) Number of years to [...]

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Service Parts Planning

Posted in Service Parts Planning Basics, tagged , , , on March 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Generally service parts planning differs from final product planning in the following ways:

A high number of low volume irregular demand items in the planning database
Inapplicability of traditional measures of forecast error (service parts management has much higher month by month forecast error than finished good forecasting. A service part can go many months with no [...]

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Service Parts and MTBF Forecasting

Posted in Enigma, MTBF, tagged , on January 13, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Service parts for this airplane can be predicted based upon installed base and usage. The math for doing this is simple and present in multiple service parts planning applications. However, the problem is that most companies do not invest in the data maintenance.
What Type of Demand?
All service part demand is dependent demand. That is [...]

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Supersession and Interchangability in SAP

Posted in Inventory Optimization, PLM, SAP, tagged , , , on December 13, 2007 | 1 Comment »

What is Part Supersession?
Supersession is one of the most important functions in any service parts planning system. Supersession is used to both:

Substitute one part for another part
Obsolesce parts due to engineering changes driven by PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) that need to be replaced by newer versions

The supersession configuration in service parts planning systems allows [...]

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