Company Type
Alstom Power — Turbine & Generator Repair, the Global 500 turbine/generator repair division; “Give the Shop a Break” — seasonal shop workers had never taken holiday time off in the plant's 20+ year history; 4 months from design to live.
What Drove the Need
No structured planning and scheduling for a seasonal repair shop; daily 45-minute planning meetings with 30+ staff
Business Impact
Contributed to eliminating the daily 45-minute planning meetings with 30+ staff; first holiday time off for shop personnel in 20+ years (Case 4)
Systems/Data Integration
JDE F4801 work orders and F3112 routing operations via the Oracle-based enterprise data warehouse
Design
Time-bucket engine: capacity plan code with starting week, week/month fence, and last month over a rolling 52-week horizon — pre-start operations into week 1, pre-fence into weekly buckets, post-fence into monthly
Capacity math: Hours Available = Resources × Hours/Day × Period Days × Efficiency × Utilization, recalculated on any change; the same resource assignable multiple times with different hours/day to pre-stage scenarios; roll-up from work center to department
Chart refresh decoupled from record edits so planners adjust several departments before recalculating
Technology Stack
MS Access 2010/VBA (Capacity Planning Application, Collier & Associates ©2008)
Oracle ODBC to Alstom's enterprise data warehouse; pivot-chart visualization
Shop Floor Work Center, Machine & Resource Modeling/Planning Application
Interactive level-setting of machines, employees, and contractors by period; refresh of ~50,000 open work order and routing operations from the enterprise data warehouse in 1–2 minutes; what-if analysis against contracted and forecasted orders for setting production levels.
