If you are subscribed to the Product Updates on this community, you might have received an email notification on February 2nd in which the link to the product update did not work. With today's release, the links should work properly again. 

SC Navigator 24.2.1

Date February 15, 2024

• New Features

  • The name of the uploaded Excel file will now be stored together with the dataset. It is shown in dataset overviews. This allows you to see what the source of the data is.

  • The model has been extended with two attributes "Minimum Capacity" and "Maximum Capacity" on the "Production Routing" sheet. That allows you to specify the capacity for a Bill of Material. (This value is in the same capacity unit as the data on sheet "Production".)

  • A new sheet has been added: Bill of Material Groups. This allows you to create groups of Bill of Materials, in the same way that you create Product and Supplier groups. You can use {BOM} groups for the above-mentioned Minimum Capacity and Maximum Capacity. These capacities are also shown in the Results - Production page, as well as in the Excel and Database/Parquet results.

  • The Minimum and Maximum # of Open Suppliers/Productions/Warehouses attributes have been added to the Supplier, Production, and Warehouse sheets in the template. These allow count constraints to be added for curly bracket location, supplier, production and warehouse groups. More information on count constraints can be found in the documentation: Count and Ratio Constraints.

• Improvements

  • On page Results - Warehouse, when comparing scenarios, the "Throughput, Inventory" chart groups results by dataset.

  • After feedback from various users, we have adjusted the behavior of the model when using a Bill of Material that is specified over multiple production facilities in the "Production Routing" sheet. In previous versions, such a bill of material was required to use all facilities. The current model can pick one or more, depending on how much production capacity is needed. If desired, the old behavior can be achieved, by creating multiple Bill of Materials together with intermediate products.

  • On page Results - KPI Overview, and on the KPI Summary page, costs for Suppliers/Productions/Warehouses have been split into three buckets - Fixed Cost, Variable Cost, and Open/Close Cost.

  • On the KPI Summary page, the Service Widget now also contains the Cost Per UOM and the (number of) Open Suppliers/Productions/Warehouses.

  • The capacity on the server that is used to do all the optimization requests is shared by all users that use the same cloud. Previously, all optimization requests from all users were handled with the same priority. This means that a normal optimization request that was started by one user, had the same priority as Trade-Off Analysis or Risk Analysis requests that were started by another user. So, if you started a normal request after someone else started an Analysis request, it could take a long time before your request would be processed. Now, normal optimization runs have priority over runs from Trade-Off Analysis or Risk Analysis.

  • On page Center of Gravity, the transportation speed can be changed now. The default value is the average speed of all transportation types in the dataset.

  • In the dialog Add CoGs to the set of Warehouses, the values for Warehouse Group for CoGs and Location Group for CoGs are now initialized with the CoG Location Group/CoG Warehouse Group value provided in the template.

  • We have removed the "Solution found" dialog message at the end of a Solve Max Drive Time run, to prevent an unnecessary click.

  • By default, Suppliers are no longer included in the CoG calculations as many users ran into the warning Warning infinite capacity treated as zero. If you want to include suppliers, please select them again on page CoG Settings.

  • You can now edit the Center of Gravity Wiggle Factor parameter. The initial value is set to the average of the Transportation Wiggle factor in input data.

  • The tooltip for the CoG Weight Factor now includes a brief explanation of what this parameter controls.

  • When exporting CoG locations, the CoG Primary/Secondary Transport Cost values will be used to populate the 'Cost Per Distance' for primary or secondary lanes connecting the exported CoG locations. This ensures consistency between the parameters used in the Center of Gravity analysis and the exported data to be used in subsequent network optimization workflows.

  • SC Navigator could report models with inventory and {warehouse group} capacity constraints incorrectly as infeasible.

• Bug Fixes

  • In some cases, saving the results datasets could be much slower in SC Navigator version 24.1.1, compared to the previous version.

  • The Weighted Average Lead Time on the KPI Summary dialog was using the Maximum lead time, instead of the actual lead time.

  • On page Results, the coloring in the Reference Result map was not correct. It used the same coloring as the Active Result map, while it should color based on the data of the Reference Result dataset.

  • The calculation of Rate Card cost was not correct when lanes were defined with curly brackets. In that case, some costs were duplicated.

  • The data validation executed after Add CoGs to the set of Warehouses could give incorrect data validation errors and warnings.

  • The Trade-Off Analysis did not work correctly when having more than 10 runs and some of the runs would be marked as infeasible incorrectly.

  • The model could incorrectly generate this warning when loading a dataset: There exists a warehouse that has 'Inventory Cover', but no 'Available (Inventory)' for next period.