Fastems Adding AI-accelerated Smart Scheduling Capabilities into an Industrial SaaS Offering

What was the challenge?

Fastems provides flexible CNC automation and digital solutions for high-mix, low-volume manufacturing. Fastems Factory Cockpit is a SaaS solution that brings together data from shop floor devices and IT systems, providing real-time situational awareness. It visualizes and analyzes the data, allowing well-informed decisions, to lead and continuously develop manufacturing.

Capacity planning and operations scheduling in this type of dynamic and ever changing environment is difficult, time consuming and unreliable. Fastems was looking for ways to help their customers plan their operations better and quantify the value their automation and digital solutions can bring to customers.

Our solution

Production order data was extracted from Fastems Factory Cockpit system and developed into an AI-powered smart scheduling optimization model. The AI model takes into account the different variables and constraints affecting the production process and finds good quality schedules. The AI model automatically fetches the production order data from Fastems data platform and runs the computationally heavy optimization algorithms on cloud infrastructure.

Why Codento?

Codento was selected due to extensive application development and data science experience, good understanding of the customer’s challenge and an agile customer-centric approach.

What were the results?

With the AI optimization model for smart scheduling, Fastems can optimize their clients production schedules in many aspects: production order delay, order lead time and resource utilization. The model also allows them to simulate how the operations improve if some machinery is replaced with better performing automated solutions.

This AI-powered smart scheduling approach can be deployed as an integrated feature of a best-of-breed software platform or as a separate smart scheduling capability at the factory-level for multi-platform optimization. The model can be adapted to suit optimizing indoor and outdoor logistics and supply chain management.

In customer’s own words

“Codento approached us with an interesting idea of creating a smart scheduling AI-powered model to optimize the production schedule of our customers’ production plans. The model gives insight into potential bottlenecks, adapts to changes in the environment and allows for simulation of operations if machines are added or replaced. Prior to this, we did not have a way of quantifying or evaluating customers’ production plans nor give them insight into how much their production would benefit by adding or replacing machines. Overall, I am very pleased with the value that this approach provided!”

Topi Judén

Head of Business, Digital Manufacturing

Fastems Oy