Advanced Scheduling

Advanced Scheduling software enables manufacturers to make scheduling decisions based on an accurate model of the manufacturing environment. Interactive and able to account for multiple constraints, Advanced Scheduling takes into consideration the availability of resources, tooling, materials, and other sources of scheduling limitations. The Advanced Scheduling system schedules orders efficiently using intelligent built-in rules, and it also allows planners to manually interact with the schedule to make changes based on their experience or new information.

Advanced Scheduling provides decision-making support for overtime, order prioritization, split production batches, due date negotiation, and order processing. If used together with Advanced Planning software, Advanced Scheduling can send detailed production schedule information to the planning system to override planned volume with scheduled volume. Integrating Advanced Scheduling with Advanced Planning results in the ability to re-calculate a Master Production Schedule (MPS) based on information from the production schedule.

The combination of Advanced Scheduling and Advanced Planning can be used for detailed sequencing and scheduling, medium-term tactical planning with a few weeks planning horizon, and long-term strategic planning covering months and years.

Advanced Scheduling software can be used as a standalone system to manage scheduling and planning, and can also be integrated with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Manufacturing Execution System (MES), and other software solutions.

Advanced Scheduling Functions

Advanced Scheduling includes numerous features that help manufacturers oversee various aspects of production scheduling:

Advanced constraint modeling—Advanced Scheduling software allows planners to model advanced resource constraints, such as rules about concurrent rule usage, and advanced inter-operation constraints including limits on the time between operations and how much operation times can be extended.

Advanced material handling—Advanced Scheduling software can implement custom rules about how materials are consumed to ensure that sub-assemblies and raw materials are consumed according to business rules. When allocating materials, the system filters and ranks data to allow quality-related or customer-specific material usage constraints to be accounted for.

Advanced schedule optimization—Advanced Scheduling software allows planners to define additional schedule optimization rules to deal with problems such as minimizing changeover times, preferred sequencing and campaigning. Composite rules can be built with and Advanced Scheduling workflow tool.

Assembly process visualization—Advanced Scheduling software enables members of the manufacturing team to visualize the assembly process from raw materials through to finished goods and sales orders. This capability provides a graphical view of the material dependencies as well as plots of stock levels over time so that planners can see where shortages will occur and choose to keep them as a constraint or ignore them.

Development environment—Advanced Scheduling software allows database schema and constraint model to be altered as required, including adding tables and fields. Custom scheduling rules can be created to solve specific scheduling problems, and custom data manipulation tools can be created for use with the workflow engine.

Interactive schedule viewing—Advanced Scheduling software enables viewer-level permissions, which allow interaction with the schedule without the ability to save changes. With this capability, the sales office can track the progress of orders and carry out order inquiries against a read-only copy of the published schedule. Management can compare actual times against scheduled completion times to assess the performance of the production process. A shop floor PC can provide the cell supervisor or machine operator with up-to-the-minute work-to-lists generated by the scheduling system.

Order-based multi-constrain scheduling—Advanced Scheduling software can be used to create order-based schedules and apply a ranking or weighting for the purpose of prioritizing orders. The software creates schedules based on the availability of resources, additional constraints, and materials required for the order. Schedules can be created that take into account different operation run speeds on different resources, use sequence-dependent changeover times based on operation attributes, and allow overlaps and slack time between operations.

Benefits of Advanced Scheduling

Advanced Scheduling improves the synchronization of manufacturing processes and provides greater visibility to increase utilization and on-time delivery while reducing inventory levels and waste. Advanced Scheduling can help manufacturers generate and evaluate what-if scenarios to achieve the best results.

Additional benefits:

• Full visibility and control
• Increased utilization and leaner operations
• Faster response to change
• Better customer service
• Higher margins