From modelling to optimising operations Manufacturing firms need to be able to optimise operations in a way that allows limited resources to be used for maximum economic yield. Now, a new technology enables enterprise optimisation for better products and enterprise functioning. Industrial Technologies © Shutterstock The 'Enterprise modelling and performance optimisation' (Emposme) project developed an Enterprise Modelling and Performance Optimisation (EMPO) tool. The EU-funded project aimed to integrate EMPO so decision makers can quickly determine the risk/reward position of any choice being considered. The integrated EMPO tool enables both increased speed and flexibility of engineer to order (ETO) and make to order (MTO) enterprises. By helping to create an enterprise model that can be transformed into an enterprise optimiser, near-optimal solutions can be generated for targeted performance metrics. Experienced enterprise practitioners can use the technology to rapidly model and represent all entities such as sales orders, and resources such as people and machines, within their firm. This is done through an interface that permits multi-criteria enterprise objective functions or goals to be defined and resource conflicts to be diagnosed and resolved. In this way, managers can evaluate the solutions proposed and deploy them to individuals involved in value generation activities. The range of Emposme tools was validated through deployment at one firm's end-user sites, with the automatically generated optimisers being tested in production situations. Results highlighted opportunities to further develop a powerful generic optimisation solver that performed well in all of the problem test sets.
