Why Develop Aurora Pro-Plan

Aurora-ProPlan was developed because the massive benefits that can be realized by the application of intelligent scheduling to the unique domain of Pharmaceutical production. That is, companies like Pfizer are realizing the benefits, including cost savings and better inventory control, of Intelligence based Manufacturing (IbM) of which intelligent scheduling is a significant component. Aurora-ProPlan has significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in pharmaceutical production management by leveraging the powerful capabilities of our Aurora intelligent scheduling engine and customizing it to deal with the unique constraints and metrics found in the Pharma industry. By using sophisticated scheduling software as the underpinnings for production optimization, Aurora-ProPlan can be applied to global production scheduling, optimizing the production not only at individual plant level, but also across plants to maximize the efficiency of the entire company’s production capacity. Giving Aurora-ProPlan such a solid scheduling basis also allows it to more easily handle complex situations such as new orders being inserted in real-time, as well as other radical changes to the situation such as unexpected machine downtime or entire production facility downtime.

Traditional scheduling systems use simple algorithms and criteria when selecting the next activity to schedule and when assigning resources and times to each activity. However, schedules generated by these simple and generic decision rules are often far from optimal. Aurora-ProPlan can optimize over many metrics, such as carrying costs, while minimizing the production runs by ordering production to minimize changeover times that are dependent on the tasks selected to be performed before and after the changeover.