Designing a complex order acceptance tool at Limis B.V.

This study was conducted at Limis, which is the developer of advanced planning and scheduling (APS) software called Limis Planner also referred to as Limis Start. Limis users, typically operate job shop-like manufacturing systems in which they make specialized (partial) end products in response to customer demand. Therefore, they need to respond to dynamically arriving requests containing one or multiple orders consisting of one or multiple products. Based on available resource capacity (machines, materials, etc.), they need to determine whether they can and want to deliver/ fulfill the order by the requested due date. The order acceptance module of Limis Planner helps its users make this decision. It currently does so by using Limis Planner’s built in regular scheduling function, which requires a lot of computational effort and thus results in a high computation time. For the larger clients especially, this causes a high customer response time. This study aims to design a fast and reliable order acceptance method and develop a tool that enables all Limis customers to respond to dynamically arriving customer orders in mere minutes.