I have never participated in the bidding of the APS planning and scheduling system before, nor have I paid attention to the APS bidding information. All of our projects are approved by customers through POC testing and signed contracts. In my mind, I have always thought that bidding is unique to the engineering field. Recently, I was surprised to find that some large enterprises purchased APS planning and scheduling systems through public bidding. Some of the companies that won the bid were not professional APS companies, and the project prices were ridiculously high, which was really shocking. But from a professional perspective, the prospects for these projects are not optimistic.
The threshold for APS development is high and there are technical bottlenecks. It takes three years to develop a usable APS planning and scheduling system, which requires a large amount of actual data for testing. Moreover, you have to be lucky enough to find an algorithm expert to participate in the development. This expert also needs to have manufacturing knowledge, and such people are scarce resources. Many large IT companies invest a lot of money and manpower, but are unable to develop a finished APS product within a few years. Underestimating the difficulty of the project when bidding, hoping to get the contract before finding someone to develop it, will most likely lead to both parties A and B falling into a trap. Many MES companies I know strictly prohibit sales staff from promising to do all-material analysis and automatic production scheduling. This shows how big the pit is.
For the APS planning and scheduling system, which requires very high professionalism, I personally think that bidding is not a good procurement method. The bidding focuses on the company’s background and scale, and there is a certain bias. Although there will be solutions in the technical bid, the bid focuses on theory and publicity, and it is impossible to accurately determine whether the product is suitable. The tender documents of some bidding companies are simply a list of articles copied from the Internet, and do not actually have mature products.
At present, the industry generally believes that the acceptance and completion rate of APS systems is only 30%, including projects that are barely usable and very successful. While there can be many reasons for project failure, failure to evaluate carefully during procurement is the most important reason.
Based on many years of project implementation experience, we believe that POC verification is a lower-risk system evaluation method. The first step in the system evaluation of the APS planning and scheduling system is a similar case demonstration, which is to ask the manufacturer to find a project demonstration system that is in the same industry as its own company and has similar needs and has been done in the past. There are many industries where the needs of companies are very similar, such as injection molding, machining, SMT, etc. Almost all factories have similar needs. After seeing the production scheduling examples of peers, you will have a good understanding of the system. If the customer’s needs are special and there are no identical cases, you can also find the closest case demonstration. Of course, this kind of demonstration needs to pay attention to data confidentiality and the data should be desensitized.
After similar case demonstrations, many companies will require POC verification. In fact, all of our final customers have carefully completed the POC. Customers who are unwilling to invest time in testing are usually not interested in purchasing.
Users use Excel to collect their own test data. The data should include the company’s most representative products and cover the entire process flow. It is not easy to have too little POC data. If there are only a few products, the effect of scheduling cannot be seen, and the performance of the system cannot be tested.
Since POC is free, if the amount of data is too large, it will bring a certain workload to the manufacturer. In fact, being able to quickly extract data modeling from Excel is a verification of the manufacturer’s project implementation capabilities. If the model cannot be quickly modeled, it proves that the model structure is unreasonable and the system data maintenance function is inconvenient, or the consulting team is not professional enough. The basic data of the APS system can be imported in batches. There is not much difference between 5 products and 50 products. We often copy several of our customers’ products to create multiple products and orders for stress and speed testing.
When selecting vendors, the same test data should be sent to each competing vendor, completed within a limited time (1-2 weeks), and then demonstrate the system. Testing should include: basic data modeling, scheduling logic, plan display method, plan modification, actual progress update, all-material analysis, material requirements planning, etc. If the POC test cannot be completed and reasonable planning results cannot be obtained through automatic scheduling, it can be concluded that there is no mature system and it can basically be ruled out.
Logical verification is also a kind of protection for Party B. Through testing, we can understand whether Party A’s needs are reasonable, whether the model data is complete, and whether the product can meet Party A’s needs. If secondary development is required, how difficult will it be and how long will it take? This avoids making promises you can’t keep.
Due to regulations, many state-owned enterprises must find manufacturers through bidding, and POC can be combined with bidding. For example, a POC is done before the bidding meeting, and only companies that pass the POC test can participate in the formal bidding. Or require the use of test data to give examples in the bid, and use POC test examples to introduce the system at meetings, etc.
In short, by not being afraid of trouble and conducting rigorous testing during the evaluation period, you can greatly reduce the risk of system introduction and avoid unfinished projects in the future. Although some companies have deep pockets and may not care about financial losses, the time and energy invested and the impact on personnel confidence far outweigh the financial losses.
Finally, I wish everyone can successfully import the APS planning and scheduling system!