With the deepening development and increasing maturity of the printing and packaging industry in China, as well as the arrival of the post-pandemic era, competition among printing and packaging enterprises has become more intense. Rising operating costs, price pressure from upstream customers, and increased environmental costs continue to squeeze profit margins, placing printing and packaging enterprises under tremendous survival pressure. After years of explosive growth, China's printing and packaging industry will enter a consolidation phase characterized by fierce competition, where "survival of the fittest" will become the dominant theme. Enhancing management capabilities will be the key for Chinese printing and packaging enterprises to survive this intense competition, and as typical manufacturing enterprises, production management will take center stage.

Regarding material and capacity planning as well as detailed shop floor scheduling, printing and packaging enterprises often adopt an order-acceptance policy of taking every order that comes in and use rough capacity estimation for scheduling because they cannot accurately grasp actual production capacity conditions on the manufacturing floor and material delivery schedules. However, under the fundamental premise of improving customer service levels and promising delivery dates, production workshops often resort to overtime or outsourcing to meet order deadlines. Furthermore, since material planning fails to consider capacity constraints, raw material procurement plans may not align with production schedules, thereby affecting established production progress and creating a vicious cycle of either failing to meet customer delivery dates or incurring excessive costs. Consequently, they are unable to quickly respond to customer demands or formulate profitable available-to-promise (ATP) order quantities and delivery dates. To address these issues, an enterprise information application system that can properly and effectively plan corporate resources (such as manpower, machinery, materials, methods, and environment) to meet customer demands, achieve maximum output, highest bottleneck resource utilization, and shortest lead times, while assisting production managers in identifying practically feasible production solutions, has become urgently needed. While current ERP systems focus on financial management and coordination of the entire supply chain, they neglect management of specific production processes and fail to consider the limited production capacity of resources when formulating production schedules, thus unable to achieve truly effective production scheduling. Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) systems, on the other hand, can make scheduling calculations more precise and solve production scheduling problems that ERP cannot address. Unfortunately, many domestic software companies currently lack the capability to develop APS with such functional requirements; only some international platform-oriented SaaS suite software companies can achieve this, such as the European Sistrade software (a highly intelligent, integrated digital management software specifically designed for the printing and packaging sector, which entered the Chinese market at the end of the year before last and is currently being implemented and practiced at Shenzhen Jinjia Group). This article will conduct a comparative analysis of the characteristics of traditional scheduling methods, ERP system scheduling methods, and APS advanced scheduling methods, hoping to provide some reference for packaging enterprises considering the introduction of APS automated production scheduling systems.

Traditional Scheduling Methods

Traditional scheduling in printing and packaging enterprises refers to production dispatchers using Microsoft Excel software to edit production schedules. This scheduling method has the following main drawbacks.

1. Excessive human factors and uncertainty Production dispatchers need to spend considerable time analyzing customer orders received from the customer service department (including previously scheduled orders), calculating whether orders can be completed within the timeframes requested by customers. If completion is not possible, the information is fed back to the customer service department for joint negotiation with the customer by both customer service and production departments; if completion is feasible, the most appropriate production line is selected and optimal production timing is arranged to fulfill the order. To accomplish these tasks, production dispatchers require at least one year to understand production processes and various operational details. In summary, in traditional scheduling methods, production dispatchers play a dominant role, and high-quality personnel with strong sense of responsibility are required, which introduces considerable uncertainty into the traditional scheduling approach.

2. Inability to adjust promptly when facing unexpected situations When customer orders are temporarily modified, production equipment breaks down, or raw and auxiliary material supplies are insufficient, production dispatchers must update production schedules accordingly. Even changing the production status of just one production line requires rescheduling all products on that line, and if production lines can be used interchangeably, the situation becomes even more complex. Such timely rescheduling is simply impossible to achieve manually, necessitating computer assistance.

3. Delayed information feedback leading to inability to complete product processing as required When creating schedules, production dispatchers need to extensively examine equipment, raw and auxiliary materials, and other factors, all of which change in real-time. Production dispatchers cannot grasp these factors in real-time, meaning the schedules they create cannot fully address actual conditions. Moreover, as order volumes increase, the slow transmission of information through manual channels results in delayed schedule updates, causing phenomena such as orders failing to be completed on time and partial capacity waste."

ERP System Scheduling Methods

Faced with problems such as inventory backlogs or untimely product deliveries caused by traditional scheduling methods, excessive reliance on the experience of production dispatchers, and lack of reasonable and reliable data for reference, many printing and packaging enterprises have introduced ERP systems for scheduling. However, using existing printing ERP systems for scheduling also has some drawbacks: ① ERP system scheduling plans are formulated under the premise of infinite production capacity, whereas actual production capacity is limited; ② Production dispatchers still use paper orders when issuing orders, and information feedback from production workshops relies on manual data collection followed by entry into the ERP system, which cannot achieve timely and effective information transmission; ③ When facing uncertain disruptive factors such as equipment failures, emergency order insertions, or personnel absences, timely corresponding adjustments cannot be made; ④ Once production plans are set, they must be executed according to the established schedule, and real-time control and post-event feedback are not considered when formulating production plans, making it impossible to dynamically ensure the correlation between various processes, which can easily lead to imbalanced output between processes, increased inventory, and inconsistency between demand and production; ⑤ Due to the inability to achieve real-time scheduling, information available to printing enterprise managers is unreliable; ⑥ The production management module of ERP only focuses on optimization of internal enterprise resources and cannot provide support for the operation of supply chain management systems, lacking coordination of supply chain production plans, which to some extent restricts enterprises from formulating accurate and realistic production plans.

For example, when a certain printing factory uses an ERP system for scheduling, the system can identify orders that may exceed their production deadlines through certain algorithms and provide alarm prompts, thus avoiding order delays to a certain extent. Moreover, when encountering unexpected situations, the ERP system can also issue warnings, enabling various orders to be completed within their delivery periods. Additionally, production managers can view the production progress of enterprise orders through production progress charts. Although the ERP system has improved the company's production management, deficiencies still remain: ① fully automated production dispatching work still cannot be achieved; ② production feedback for orders remains insufficiently timely; ③ when facing uncertain disruptive factors, production dispatching work is not timely and automatic scheduling cannot be completed; ④ once production plans are set, they must be executed according to the established schedule.

APS Principles

The core of APS is the synchronous, real-time, constraint-capable simulation of all resources (including materials, machinery and equipment, personnel, supply, customer demand, transportation, and other factors affecting planning) to derive optimized production plans, as shown in Figure 1. Both long-term and short-term plans are optimized and executable. Since APS concurrently considers all constraints in the supply chain, whenever a change occurs (such as the addition of a new order), APS simultaneously checks capacity constraints, material constraints, demand constraints, transportation constraints, and financial constraints, ensuring that supply chain plans remain valid at all times. When determining production plans, APS can also employ genetic algorithm technology, based on mimicking biological evolution processes, to obtain "optimal" solutions.

APS can collect data in real-time throughout the entire production process from raw material input to finished product warehousing, automatically generate real-time production schedules, and conduct real-time monitoring and control of the entire production process. Through automated management and scheduling of factory resources such as materials, warehouses, equipment, personnel, quality, processes, abnormalities, process instructions, and other facilities, APS enables packaging enterprises to implement a production management model with production planning as the command center, fully utilizing various resources to improve production efficiency.

　　

                                                                                         

Distinctions and Connections Between APS and ERP (as shown in Figure 2)

　　

Distinctions Between APS and ERP

There are two main distinctions between production management in traditional ERP and APS:

1. Planning in traditional ERP is based on infinite resource constraints, whereas APS is based on finite resource constraints. Traditional ERP lacks capacity and material constraints, making it impossible to achieve precise scheduling and optimization, nor can it respond to rapid changes. Relatively speaking, traditional ERP planning is based on mass production models, manufacturer-dominated, and seller's market-oriented planning models. In contrast, APS is oriented toward small-batch, multi-variety production models, customer-dominated, and buyer's market-oriented planning models, particularly suitable for the current actual conditions in the packaging industry characterized by small orders, numerous varieties, and short lead times.

2. Traditional ERP planning only addresses one link in the supply chain—manufacturers. APS, however, is primarily used for integrated supply chain planning (comprising suppliers, manufacturers, and customers), representing a global-oriented planning approach. Of course, it now also integrates with traditional ERP to optimize planning for individual enterprises.

Connections Between APS and ERP

APS is not an entirely new enterprise management model separate from ERP, but rather a development and refinement of ERP. From a historical development perspective, traditional ERP planning models emerged first, followed by APS planning models. From the perspective of individual manufacturing enterprise usage, users should first ensure that all static data in ERP (such as supplier information, customer information, material codes, BOM data, and process data) is 100% accurate; dynamic business data should be relatively accurate, preferably 100%; particularly the three major orders (sales orders, production orders, and purchase orders) should be under integrated management, with inventory achieving strict consistency between accounts and physical items. Only at this point does the consideration of implementing APS become a natural progression, as the foundation upon which APS operates is precisely this data.

Why Printing and Packaging Enterprises Need APS

With the rapid development of society, consumer demand characteristics have quickly shifted toward personalized consumption. Mobile phones, computers, automobiles, and other products are all pursuing personalization and distinctiveness. Consequently, the printing and packaging industry has inevitably become characterized by personalization and diversification, transitioning from original large-batch order production to small-batch, multi-variety, fast-paced discrete order production models.

Existing ERP systems cannot comprehensively consider all production constraints, nor can they automatically and rapidly generate reasonable production schedules. Instead, they rely on manual scheduling, thus failing to meet the actual production demands of "fast, short, and small," and unable to achieve promised product delivery dates. Unreasonable production scheduling results in significant waste of equipment, labor, and other resources, reduces production efficiency, causes internal competition for production resources within enterprises, affects employee morale, and delays product delivery dates. According to recent user complaint statistics, the proportion of complaints regarding delayed delivery dates has been increasing. Delivery delays seriously disrupt customers' production plans, considerably damage corporate image, and severely weaken enterprise competitiveness. Product delivery dates have become the primary factor for customers when selecting and evaluating suppliers.

APS solves dynamic process management problems that ERP cannot address. It is an optimized plan based on finite resource capabilities, simultaneously considering true production conditions such as enterprise resource capacity, time, products, constraints, and logical relationships. Its advantages are mainly manifested as follows:

1. Rapid and accurate delivery date prediction: Based on current production plans and execution status, combined with customer requirements, reasonably adjust order production priority levels. With full consideration of production bottleneck capacities, quickly calculate order delivery dates according to production configuration and procurement status.

2. Fully automated scheduling that globally optimizes production plans based on product process attributes, equipment capabilities, current production progress, and other factors, promptly calculating optimal production schedules that meet order requirements. This includes the latest or earliest start and completion times that can satisfy orders, as well as accurate material requirement plans corresponding to precise times.

3. When new orders are added or existing orders are changed, immediate knowledge of the联动 impact on other orders can be obtained. By inputting order changes into the system, APS can rapidly and automatically regenerate production plans. After rescheduling, the latest possible delivery dates for each order can be immediately known, along with the differences in advance or delay times.

4. Automatic statistics and reminders for personnel to specially follow up on urgent orders, production orders not completed as planned, and process tasks.

5. Refined scheduling within workshops, knowing exactly: for each production line and each machine in the workshop, from what time to what time,which production order to process, what quantity to produce, what molds to use, and what materials and quantities are required.

6. Automatic calculation of capacity load, balancing capacity allocation, and automatically generating precise resource occupation for order tasks and real-time accurate material requirement plans for these orders. While fully meeting production requirements, minimizing inventory and freeing up working capital.

How Packaging Enterprises Can Introduce APS

Introducing APS represents a transformation of enterprise management processes, rather than merely importing a software. Many large and medium-sized printing and packaging enterprises in China have already gained experience in introducing ERP systems. Building upon thorough mastery of ERP, they can either engage professional software consulting companies to develop APS-related functions or directly introduce mature APS products for the global printing and packaging sector, such as the European Sistrade software mentioned above. Whether developing based on existing ERP systems or directly introducing mature APS products, attention must be paid to providing professional training to relevant departmental employees concurrently with software introduction, and involving them in the APS development process when necessary, to ensure that APS aligns with enterprise realities and minimizes resistance during implementation.

Conclusion

To enhance production planning management levels in printing and packaging enterprises, break away from the current passive scheduling situation prevalent in most production planning, implement proactive refined advanced scheduling management, enable production planning managers to focus on key priorities in their daily work, respond calmly to and resolve various bottleneck processes and abnormal situations during production, and achieve smooth production processes and on-time delivery, it is essential to establish precise production planning and immediate production process monitoring management. With its rapid and accurate delivery date prediction, fully automated and refined production scheduling, APS will greatly improve on-time delivery rates for printing and packaging enterprises while simultaneously reducing inventory and increasing capacity utilization. Printing and packaging enterprises that take the lead in introducing and applying APS in their company management can further shorten order delivery times and stand out in fierce industry competition to gain advantages.