Die changes, colour blocks and a call-off that moved at 06:00, planned together.
A tier-1 plant runs to someone else’s schedule. EDI releases move the week’s call-offs, dies fit some presses and not others, paint runs in colour blocks, and a late rack means premium freight or a line-stop charge. Orvixo holds every rule your plant runs on and re-solves the press, weld and paint plan when a release changes or a press goes down. Tooling, operators and the frozen window are respected, and the reasoning is written down for the shift lead.
What makes automotive hard to plan
Changeover depends on what ran before
A die change on a big press is measured in hours. A dark-to-light colour change costs more purge than light-to-dark. Setup is not a fixed overhead per job; it is a function of the sequence, so the order of the week decides how much capacity the week has.
The call-off is not a forecast
OEM releases arrive by EDI: a planning schedule out to the horizon, then firm daily call-offs, and for sequenced parts a broadcast that fixes the build order. Quantities change inside the week. Miss a slot and you pay premium freight; stop their line and you pay for that too.
Dies and presses are a compatibility matrix
A die fits a press with the right bed and tonnage, and one or two presses hold the only alternates. Dies wear too: after so many hits they go to the toolroom. Two jobs that each fit a press may not fit the plant in the same shift.
People are certified, not interchangeable
A press family needs a Level-3 operator; a die change needs a setter; a weld cell needs a welder approved to the customer’s spec. The constraint at 02:00 is who is on nights, not which machine is idle.
Coil, blanks and racks are part of the plan
Steel arrives as coil by grade and gauge. Blanks are cut ahead. Finished parts leave in returnable racks the customer controls. Run out of any of them and the press stands idle with an operator on it.
The frozen window is a promise
What has been published to the floor is what the setters, the material handlers and the customer’s dock plan against. A re-plan has to work around it, not through it.
How Orvixo plans it
Setup as a sequence matrix
Changeover time is modelled per transition: die to die, colour to colour, coil to coil. The plan groups runs to cut setups where it can and spends one only when it buys something, such as a call-off shipped in sequence.
Releases in the model
The customer’s releases and sequence broadcasts are constraints, not a spreadsheet beside the plan. When a call-off changes, the plan re-solves to the new quantities and dates and shows the slack left on every dock time.
Tooling, presses and alternates solved together
Dies and fixtures are resources with calendars, compatibility and hit counts. When a press fails, work moves to a press that can take the die, has a setter on shift and is not due for maintenance.
Certification-aware assignment
Operator approvals and rosters are in the model, so a run is only placed where someone certified will be present. Move it to nights and the plan checks the night crew, not the day one.
Colour blocks and kanban loops kept whole
Paint runs in blocks with a maximum number of colour changes per shift. Weld and sub-assembly feed the line through kanban loops with a fixed number of racks. Both are rules, so a re-plan never splits a block or overfills a loop.
Re-solve around the frozen window
Published work is pinned. Everything after it re-solves in seconds when a press stops or a release moves, and each move is written down: which rule, which resource, which call-off. Your shift lead reviews and publishes, or Orvixo publishes within the rules you set.
The ones your best planner already knows.
Written in plain language by your team, compiled by Orvixo into constraints the plan must respect. These are the ones we see in most tier-1 press, weld and paint plants.
See it on your lines.
Talk us through how your plant plans today. We will show you where Orvixo would change it.