DUALIS shows: Production planning is becoming adaptive

Why reliable data, historization and analytics are becoming more important

• Rising complexity is undermining traditional production planning, driven by factors such as product variety, material shortages and volatile conditions.
• Reliable data and historization are essential to systematically compare planning and reality and enable continuous optimization.
• DUALIS focuses on adaptive planning that continuously improves based on real production data and deviations.
• The result: more realistic and flexible production processes with greater planning reliability.

Dresden, 18. May 2026 – Production planning is facing growing demands. Increasing product variety, material shortages, volatile supply chains and short-term orders are becoming more common. Plans that appear sound under stable assumptions often fail to hold up in everyday operations. As a result, production planning must increasingly learn from real execution. DUALIS GmbH IT Solution demonstrates why reliable data and the ability to systematically align planning and reality are crucial.

Production planning is undergoing a fundamental transformation. For a long time, the focus was on allocating orders as efficiently as possible to resources and time slots. Today, an additional question comes to the forefront: how can planning learn from practice instead of always starting from the current state when replanning?

“For DUALIS, this marks the next level of maturity in modern production planning. Planning must not only calculate the current state, but also learn from actual execution. A plan is only good if it can be quickly adapted and works under real conditions,” says Dr. Kirsten Hoffmann, Product Manager at DUALIS.

Data as a limiting factor

Production planning is subject to numerous constraints—from materials and machines to shift models, skills and technological dependencies. At the same time, there are conflicting objectives between throughput time, utilization, costs and delivery reliability.

At this point, a central weakness of many planning systems becomes evident: the data foundation. Realistic production planning is only as good as the data it is based on. This includes master data such as items, bills of materials, routings, setup matrices, capacities and standard times, as well as transactional and feedback data from the shop floor.

All levels influence planning quality. Even small errors in master data can have a significant impact. Inaccurate standard times, incomplete routings or incorrectly modeled setup states can lead to considerable consequences. A plan may appear plausible, but in practice often proves too optimistic, unstable or not feasible.

Historization as the key lever

If production planning is to become adaptive, it is not enough to calculate the current state. The ability to systematically compare planning and actual execution over time is crucial. Companies need to understand what a plan looked like at a specific point in time, when and why it was changed, and how production actually unfolded. Only this temporal context makes deviations transparent—and usable.

“Production planning is always a hypothesis about how manufacturing will develop under current assumptions. That is why having good data once is not enough. Planning must be continuously aligned with reality and adjusted accordingly,” explains Dr. Kirsten Hoffmann.

Versioned storage of planning states and their changes makes patterns and systematic deviations visible. Combined with actual feedback data, it becomes possible to identify where production deviates from plan, which operations take longer, how often replanning occurs and where bottlenecks arise.

GANTTPLAN Analytics bridges the gap between planning and reality

With GANTTPLAN Analytics, DUALIS pursues a deliberately pragmatic approach. The tool systematically connects planning with real execution. It analyzes and visualizes the relationship between planned and actual outcomes.

This creates a robust data foundation that enables evaluation of planning histories, deviations and trends. The added value lies in the perspective: planning is no longer viewed solely as a snapshot target state, but as a process whose quality can be assessed over time. Companies gain insight into how stable their planning is, how often replanning occurs and where assumptions diverge from reality.

The benefits of GANTTPLAN Analytics become visible on multiple levels. KPIs, reports and dashboards provide transparency on lead times, inventories, delivery reliability and bottlenecks. Based on historical data, more realistic forecasts can be developed for operation durations, delivery dates and risks.

“In the future, industrial companies will rely on more reliable plans, more stable processes, more realistic deadlines and faster responsiveness. These capabilities arise from consistently linking planning with reality,” explains Dr. Kirsten Hoffmann.

The target vision is not a radical break with existing approaches, but a learning workflow. Humans remain at the center: they evaluate, prioritize and make decisions. It is this continuous feedback loop that makes production planning truly adaptive.