What Is It?
A Product Wheel is an attempt to mitigate the following production problem.
The ‘product wheel’ approach is the name for the formal resolution of a typical scheduling problem: to produce n different SKU’s in a single step production process, in m possible resources or machines. Problem can be addressed in two stages as follows: to allocate products to their best manufacturing option (distribute the n products among the m resources), and to schedule the assigned products in the right resource in an optimal sequence. - Rual Tome, Juan Manual Dominguez of S&T
The pie chart or wheel represents production runs on a particular resource or set of resources.
The product wheel is really a pie chart which essentially shows the competing products for manufacturing resources as an endless cycle. Higher demand products are given longer production runs that lower demanded products, that is one determination of the “width” of the slices of the product wheel. The other dimension is sequence. Here the sequencing of runs is designed to match with the twin needs of minimal inventory combined with the need to have product available to ship when needed. Thus we have come up with a compressed defintion.
Where production is scheduled in a way to make best use of production resources in view of competing products and with meeting the needs of minimal inventory and maximum inventory availability at the right time for shipment to warehouses – SAP Planning
Product Wheel and PPDS?
There is nothing special that needs to be done in order to implement the product wheel concept with PPDS. If the PPDS model is an accurate reflection of the production constraints and the demand dates are correct, PPDS will naturally create a “product wheel” in terms of the production plan. This simply comes down to how accurately PPDS is modeled.
Conclusion
The concept of the product wheel is a convenient visual concept for humans to understand something, that if PPDS, or other production planning and scheduling systems can already produce, as long as they are fed the appropriate information.
Reference
http://sytsa.com/repository/success_stories/ingles/ps_p_the_product_wheel_approach.pdf?PHPSESSID=8f27b1f8905f9bfe4cab217f03900c79
