Planning under energy availability constraints.

Our economy is discovering planning under energy constraints.

The advent of ERP, MOM and MES has greatly helped manufacturers in the control of their supplies from all over the world, the control of their work in progress and the multiplication of product ranges to satisfy world markets.

The volatility of market prices due to sanitary, climatic and finally geopolitical crises will be added to the equation, as well as future energy supply shortages (and not only...).

More recently, environmental constraints (carbon taxes), incentives to reduce absorbed power (load shedding) and the multiplication of IT development for intelligent control/sourcing (Smart grids) have been added to the equation, increasing constraints and complicating the major laws of production management, particularly the laws of scheduling and planning.

The problem is that manufacturers do not know the energy weight of their production orders!

How has the industry adapted to these so far minor exogenous constraints and how will it have to evolve to offer more agility and resilience?

Planning this way rather than that way will become strategic.

And changing the scale of analysis will therefore become essential.

Yet the industry is not quite ready. It pilots with macro, global data and outdated decision support tools (Dashboard).

Until now, no problem, manufacturers were concerned about the economic weight of the increase in energy-related charges, network taxes or the price of carbon, energy prices, the deterioration of their image, the exchange rate and even the difficulty of accessing certain types of financing, to which they have adapted after the fact.

At the same time, they have discovered the environmental burden that their activity imposes on the planet.

Industry players have to cope with high taxes, heavy investments to upgrade their technologies (utilities), and equally high investments to rebuild a clean image on the markets.

Some of them are trying to compensate for this burden by resorting to the CEE and the commitments to reduce their consumption, which until now have limited their breakage. They had high hopes smart grids will absorb these phenomena and limit their costs.

The situation is changing, it is no longer the environmental impact or the cost of energy that is a problem, and it wont be for the years to come, but the availability of energy.

We will have to "pilot under energy constraints".

Between the Dashboard and technological optimization, there is no energy management tool on the market.

Under these conditions, how can you imagine smoothing your power calls?

For those who have looked the other way so far, there is no other choice but to integrate energy as a constraint in their PIC/PDP in order to participate in a forced and no longer chosen "duty to erase", to feed qualified data to Smartgrids and to really benefit from their acute intelligence.

In the same way that the opening of industrial markets to the global economy was supported by ERPs, the choice of an "Ad on Energy" to the ERP is an essential resilient adjustment to an industrial strategy that will have to face the changes of a physical world that has its limits.

Feel free to comment on this post if you are interested in the subject.