FICO^® Manufacturing Solver, an Xpress Insight Solution

Reduces costs and increases throughput and revenue: Expand controllable margins by 5-20% by discovering optimal strategies and tactics across all manufacturing operations.

Solves tough problems with conflicting objectives: Leverage high-performance algorithms to find the optimal balance across many different objectives and consider a myriad of constraints, in order to ensure operations efficiency.

Allows for business user input and control: Provide domain experts with the ability to perform simulations and make adjustments to strategies with speed, precision, and ease.

Enables customizations: Augment existing technology solutions by developing targeted solutions tailored to meet your unique business needs.

Future-proofs: Develop your own solution extensions and/or adjacent optimization solutions, using rapid application development features and the fastest solvers available. Stay in sync with market needs.

Increases adoption rates: Enhances collaboration across teams and locations to develop prototypes and deploy applications rapidly, ensuring endusers get what they expected and need. Joint ownership between the business user and developer increases adoption and usage.

FICO Manufacturing Solver is a pre-configured solution that accelerates time to value. With a series of robust optimization models to synchronize production, crew scheduling and adaptive maintenance operations, complex flows and assignments can be modeled quickly and efficiently. With the ability to access the models themselves, custom constraints and formulations are more readily accessible. Using the Xpress Insight View Designer, the user interface can be also be rapidly modified to improve usability and workflow needs. 

FICO Manufacturing Solver is built on the FICO Xpress Insight platform using FICO Xpress Mosel and FICO Xpress Solver. FICO Xpress Solver provides the widest breadth of industry leading optimization algorithms and technologies. FICO Xpress Mosel is a powerful modeling language for math models, custom heuristics, sub-model parallelization, R/Python in-memory integration, and much more.

FICO Manufacturing Solver is one of several Xpress Insight solutions. Complementary Xpress Insight solutions include FICO® Supply Chain  Solver, FICO® Forecaster and FICO® Vehicle Routing Planner. Xpress Insight also provides the capability to “roll-your-own” custom apps on the Xpress Insight platform. All of this plus a rich set of REST APIs to enable more automation and/or integration between apps.

FICO Manufacturing Solver supports both tactical and operational decisions, effectively combining production scheduling, crew scheduling and adaptive maintenance scheduling business processes.  Specifically, it addresses the following decisions in a flexible framework to fit your business model (not the other way around):

• Production scheduling decisions:  What machine sequence should each job follow?  Conversely, what sequence of jobs, changeovers and cleanings should each machine follow to honor due dates, quality policies, run rates and available capacity?
• Crew scheduling decisions:  What assignment of crew resources to machines best matches skills, availability and preferences?

Adaptive maintenance decisions:  What machine components will need attention over the emerging scheduling horizon?  How can we minimize the impact of unplanned maintenance events on lost capacity?  What mix of maintenance events and reduced run rates will best mesh with production needs and available maintenance skills? 

• Model Build Time: Model formulation and code has been optimized to reduce time to generate the model that is sent to the solver.
• Data Validation: Validation of input data with error logs for feedback.
• Infeasibility Diagnostics: Feedback on causes for model infeasibility e.g. missing flow paths.
• Business Visualization: Advanced Tableau based visuals with charts, tables and mapping.