Allergen Planning in PPDS

[Former Member]

Hi Experts -

We run standard lot heuristic to create the planned orders at the plant. I would like to ask you experts as to what is the best way to deal with Allergens?

We have allergen materials color coded and displayed in the DS board. At the moment, our planners manually plan allergens and resolve any conflicts interactively. But the problem is more complex as there are too many combinations. So it cannot be as easy as just assigning a color which stands out and making sure it's OK. For example, if we assign red color to a product which contains mollusc, that in itself is not useful as a mollusc material after a fish material is OK where as a chicken soy(another allergen) before a mollusc is not OK. Note that all three materials are allergens.

Problem is we have so many SKUs that manually doing all the sequencing is getting more and more difficult and sometimes they end up scheduling a sequence which they should not. In my example, chicken soy followed by mollusc.

My questions are:

1) Is there anyway that the system can stop the user when they schedule these materials? OR

2) once all the scheduling is done, can we run any alerts to see if there are any unwanted product interactions.

To be able to handle question 1, I can create a setup matrix which says chicken soy > Mollusc = very long time, but that again in itself does not stop the user from scheduling a particular sequence. Is there any way to setup the system in such a way that system alerts all existing unwanted product interactions?

It will be great if you can share some of your experiences.

Varun

[Former Member]

Hi Varun Muni,

I think the set up matrix with a large set up time as the driver is a good way to go. I assume that the planners doing this task are well aware of the various implications and will clearly take into account the high set up time proposed by the system & understand that it stands for your allergen mix up. From my knowledge this is similar to logic used in pharma - nothing within DS stopping the actual scheduling "out of sequence" as theoritically it is a valid sequence on the specific machine!