Orchestrate Complex Production Flows & Anticipate Bottlenecks with SYSTEMA APS v2025.2
Release Date: April 30, 2025
SYSTEMA APS v2025.2 delivers the next step in advanced production control, perfectly tuned for the demands of discrete manufacturing — from automotive and electronics to semiconductor front-end and back-end production.
With enhanced WIP regulation, proactive bottleneck prediction, intuitive KPI-driven insights, and full support for complex assembly processes, SYSTEMA APS v2025.2 empowers manufacturers to stay ahead of variability, increase line predictability, and optimize resource utilization. Seamlessly integrated with the SYSTEMA product portfolio, it ensures a connected, agile, and future-proof production environment.
Kanban-Based WIP Management: Intelligent Flow Control
SYSTEMA APS v2025.2 introduces powerful Kanban capabilities, enabling users to set dynamic WIP thresholds at operation and equipment levels. Lots are prioritized to keep buffers stable, preventing both starving and overfeeding of production stages. This empowers manufacturers to apply lean pull principles even in high-mix, high-volume environments — essential for automotive body shops, SMT electronics lines, and semiconductor fabs alike.
Users can define Kanban sequences either by equipment groups or operations, with configurable target WIP and maximum WIP thresholds.
Each sequence can be refined through lot attribute filters, allowing WIP control by product, technology type, or lot category. Scheduling dynamically prioritizes lots into underfed sequences while throttling flow into overfilled areas.
Available control elements include:
- Granularity selection (lot-level or wafer-level WIP tracking),
- Dynamic fill-based prioritization,
- Customizable lot filters for selective flow control,
- Real-time sequence monitoring with WIP ratios and alerts.
Bottleneck Prediction: Move from Reaction to Prevention
With embedded bottleneck detection and forecasting, SYSTEMA APS v2025.2 enables manufacturers to anticipate congestion risks before they impact production throughput. The system continuously analyzes station throughput rates, upstream WIP accumulation, waiting time evolution, and arrival rate projections to identify where capacity constraints are forming.
Planners can immediately detect early warning signs — such as a rising queue at critical bottleneck tools or imbalances in material supply to key operations — and adjust schedules proactively to mitigate risks.
Predicted bottlenecks are visualized through interactive KPIs, heatmaps, and time-based charts, allowing production engineers to prioritize interventions where they matter most.
Scenario simulations also enable "what-if" analysis, helping planners test the impact of alternate lot prioritization strategies or resource reallocations before applying changes in production.
This new layer of foresight empowers fabs and discrete manufacturers to optimize flow efficiency, protect delivery performance, reduce cycle time variances, and maximize equipment utilization — moving from reactive firefighting to systematic, data-driven production control.
Production KPIs Reimagined: From Metrics to Management
A fully reimagined KPI monitoring interface now provides live visualization of critical production and scheduling performance indicators.
Out-of-the-box, SYSTEMA APS v2025.2 supports a broad range of operational KPIs including cycle time, workload distribution, machine utilization, due date compliance, lot transport efforts, setup change frequency, and bottleneck detection metrics.
Each KPI can be tracked over time, broken down by work center, equipment group, or product family, and visualized through intuitive line charts, heatmaps, and deviation alerts.
Beyond the provided rich set of dozens of KPI definitions, APS offers an extensible KPI framework to meet also special needs of line and production control engineers.
- Customers can configure custom KPIs based on their specific production priorities, such as energy-efficient scheduling, queue time violations, or batch size efficiency.
- KPIs can be adapted individually for different fabs, product lines, or operational goals during deployment.
- Real-time drilldowns allow planners to not only monitor deviations but to trace causes — such as bottleneck root stations, upstream WIP spikes, or transport delays — within seconds.
Assembly Scheduling: Coordinated Part Synchronization
For manufacturers managing complex multi-part assemblies, SYSTEMA APS v2025.2 delivers integrated BOM-based scheduling with native support for hierarchical part structures and process dependencies.
The scheduler can consume the entire Bill of Materials (BOM) directly within the scheduling engine, capturing component relationships, and required processing steps across independent part production flows.
Through this model, APS dynamically synchronizes the availability of subassemblies and parts, ensuring that final assembly processes are fed exactly when needed, without over-accumulation of inventory or costly delays.
Prioritization strategies can be tailored — for instance, expediting lagging parts to prevent critical-path delays, or coordinating sequence starts based on real-time WIP availability.
Industrial Applicability:
- In automotive, align powertrain, chassis, and electronics subassemblies to just-in-time final assembly operations.
- In electronics manufacturing, synchronize PCBs, enclosures, and auxiliary components for device integration.
- In semiconductor backend, coordinate die preparation, substrate attachment, and package assembly stages to maximize packaging throughput and minimize idle inventory.
This extension of SYSTEMA APS bridges the traditional gap between route-based flow control and assembly-driven production orchestration, providing a fully connected, predictable scheduling layer that mirrors real-world assembly dynamics.
Impact Estimation for Dispatch Rules: Smarter Priority Design
SYSTEMA APS v2025.2 introduces real-time impact estimation for priority schemes during scheduling configuration. As engineers define scheduling priority schemes — combining rules like High Priority, Due Date, FIFO, or Minimum Batch Size (MBS) — the scheduler instantly calculates and displays each rule’s effective influence on the computed schedule. Impact is quantified as a weight percentage, indicating how strongly a rule shapes lot selection decisions in practice, not just in theory.
This innovation transforms how line control engineers work:
Rather than relying on assumptions or trial-and-error, planners immediately see which rules dominate, which ones interact, and whether intended priorities are being realized.
This accelerates the creation of optimized scheduling strategies, improves alignment with fab performance goals (e.g., cycle time vs. on-time delivery), and greatly reduces tuning cycles during production ramp-ups or reconfiguration phases.
With SYSTEMA APS v2025.2, priority design becomes a measurable, guided process, turning scheduling from an art into a true engineering discipline.
Other Notable Improvements
- Fab State Navigator: Visual drilldown into real-time machine, lot, and maintenance states.
- Enhanced Benchmarking: Compare multiple scheduling strategies with advanced scenario analysis.
- Extended Constraint Modeling: More flexible support for batch size rules, queue timers, and maintenance planning.
- Significantly Improved Scheduler Performance: Scheduling of large fabs (1000+ tools, 10,000+ WIP) validated for near-real-time operation.
Seamless Integration Across the SYSTEMA Portfolio
SYSTEMA APS v2025.2 continues SYSTEMA’s vision of a fully integrated, smart manufacturing digital twin ecosystem. Through built-in interfaces to SYSTEMA EI Suite, SYSTEMA AutoJobber, SYSTEMA RI Suite, and SYSTEMA EDDi, APS can consume real-time equipment models, dispatch fallback rules, predictive forecasts, and historical fab data — delivering the most accurate, responsive, and intelligent scheduling possible.
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