ILOG, a purveyor of supply chain optimization engines, this week unveiled a new software suite that aims to make the expertise of in-house supply chain planning and production personnel more central to the development of custom scheduling and planning applications.
ILOG's Optimization Decision Management System (ODMS) bundles the company's core technology with new application modeling tools that ILOG said can be used for quick prototyping and development of custom planning and scheduling applications. ODMS includes ILOG CPLEX -- the optimization engine at the core of planning and scheduling modules offered by companies like SAP, Oracle, i2, and others -- in addition to the ILOG CP constraint programming engine and ILOG OPL Studio, a modeling environment that draws on application development tools such as ILOG ODM (Optimization Decision Manager).
"It used to be that all [ILOG] had were the engines that could solve the problems, and a model development tool that could only be used by a person with a master's degree, minimum, in operations research," explained Jeff Kilbreth, ILOG's director of optimization product marketing, in an interview. Because of that constraint, Kilbreth said, ILOG's go-to-market was often as the optimization engine that informed the planning and scheduling modules of other vendors' supply chain applications. Manufacturers that could not solve their planning and scheduling challenges with those off-the-shelf applications often ended up purchasing ILOG's optimization engines, which operations research (OR) experts would turn into a custom application.
Kilbreth said ILOG has sold its optimization engines to many companies over the years, but has never actually helped customers with the building of custom planning and scheduling applications. "We've only given them the tools to let them build a great optimization model." That, he said, is what ODMS changes. "Now we give people a tool ... that lets you generate a complete decision support application."
That aspect of ODMS, according to the company, means that experts building the application -- either a manufacturer's on-staff OR personnel or ILOG's technicians -- can more easily work with planners and production staff in the development phase. (The large majority of even the biggest global companies, Kilbreth said, lack an OR staff.)
The ILOG OPL Studio facilitates the development process by prototyping the application -- actually displaying screen shots of how the program will look -- at each step along the way. "All of a sudden, people who have no OR people on staff, who have no ability to do this on their own, see that we can build an optimization model in a day," Kilbreth said. Once they can see things in a normal program environment, they can help the application designers work through subsequent iterations by noting what functionality is missing or needs attention. "What we're finding is that we're able to cycle through the iteration process quite quickly," he noted. Total development time, Kilbreth said, can run from days to approximately a month.
The resulting custom planning and scheduling application typically gathers its data inputs from the system of record, juggles them with the constraints specified by the manufacturer -- revenue goals, time frames, distribution demands, and much more -- and generates a plan for the production workers to follow. In the case of more advanced facilities, the ILOG custom application can feed that plan to an ERP, MES, or SCM system for execution.
Kilbreth pointed to Coors, an ILOG customer that runs SAP as its enterprise system. The ILOG application tells SAP which production orders to deliver to which packaging lines at what time, as well as which loading docks the products should be funneled to and when. "In that sense, we are simply a bolt-on brain to the SAP system. And that's our model, that's what we want to be," Kilbreth said.
ODMS is currently shipping, but has no announced customers yet. Bob Parker, vice president of research at International Data Corp.'s Manufacturing Insights, sees strong demand for the product.
"Manufacturing companies are anxious to put their information to work with advanced decision management, but haven't had the right tools to rapidly evaluate options and involve the business experts," Parker wrote in a recent research note. "ILOG ODMS addresses that need directly."
Kilbreth pegged the average price of a full ODMS deployment at between $250,000 and $500,000. That includes the services involved in building the custom model, adjusting the GUIs to suit the customer's needs, integrating the application with a company's legacy systems, and putting it into production.
ILOG also announced three pre-packaged applications for niche areas of manufacturing. Fab PowerOps is specific to semiconductor manufacturers, and is currently running at IBM's 300mm semiconductor plant in Fishkill, NY, according to Kilbreth. The second packaged app is Plant PowerOps, which provides integrated production planning and detailed scheduling for process manufacturers. Kilbreth noted that Dannon Yogurt has installed the application at one of its plants in Mexico and plans to roll it out to 80 production facilities over the next five years. The third off-the-shelf offering is Transport PowerOps, which Kilbreth said is designed for hub and spoke-based vehicle routing, typically for customers who ship many different products to a wide range of accounts.
Fab PowerOps will be sold based on the number of process steps involved; Plant PowerOps for the number of plants and processes that use the application, and Transport PowerOps by the volume of usage.