Advanced Planning & Scheduling Implementation Speed

Any company that is evaluating production-scheduling software needs to consider the time it will take to go live. It is widely acknowledged that production-scheduling software, when properly matched to the right production environment, brings substantial benefits over using a combination of ERP & Excel.

It leads to more flexibility, better equipment utilization, higher throughput and a host of other improvements that manufacturers want. But many companies that could benefit from this software don’t use it.

Why? Well two major limiting factors are the following:

• The perceived length and effort of the implementation.
• Cost – companies already have ERP systems and Excel whereas a new system requires spending money.

We have addressed each of these issues with how we manage and design our implementations.

Faster & Easier Implementation

Production scheduling software, as with other types of advanced planning software is known to be complex. When implemented with the applications from some vendors, combined with the support of some consulting companies, advanced planning projects—as with many other types of IT projects, have gained a reputation for taking too long to implement, and this means pushing off the return on investment.

As this article will cover, it is not in fact necessary to accept long implementation times for production scheduling software.  While this is not to say that the most complex functionalities in this type of software can be implemented quickly, there is a way of designing implementations, when you have the right application that works with this approach, that can dramatically bring down the time until the initial go live.

A second important point is that after the system is live, it is important to enlarge the coverage of the software as well as the intensity of its use in order to add move value and to further improve the production schedule and inter-departmental communication.

At PlanetTogether these are two things, time to go live, and time to further improvement that we work into our overall implementation and sales approach.

Clear, Reasonable Costs

We have recently made important changes to our pricing which directly move our pricing into how our customers want to operate.

First, we start with a proof of concept (POC). In the POC we focus on bringing up our system with your data for a specific challenge. Then we give you time to evaluate the application, with an extended evaluation period. This allows you to get hands on exposure to the application in your environment. We combine each POC with targeted training. All of this happens with a very limited monthly fee and delivers value quickly in the form of: Clear requirements documentation, data gap analysis, and conceptual APS training, in addition to a fully functional test environment.

After you complete the POC (usually in one month or less) and sign up for either a subscription or perpetual license, we move into implementation. Over the years, we have gone back and analyzed our previous implementations and have made important adjustments to how we implement new customers. We have specifically designed our implementations to enable customers to go live as quickly as possible. Most of our implementation work is performed remotely, minimizing the time your staff needs to spend and enabling us to support more customers with a given staff—keeping the implementation costs down.

This is the new way of doing implementations – and is becoming the standard implementation approach of modern SaaS application vendors. With a traditional on-premises model, consultants work (and bill hourly) for months to bring up a system—however, we don’t work that way. Our pricing is fixed. This means you know exactly what you’ll be paying with zero risk of going over budget. With our approach we can literally bring up systems as quickly as you can provide the data and make your resources available to work with us. We want to get you live and using our software on one plant as soon as possible, and our financial incentives are setup not to extend projects, but rather to get you using our software effectively on as many plants as possible.

So this addresses one aspect of the scope of implementation.  In this case we normally start off with a single plant being implemented. However a scope of an implementation is not only the number of plants implemented, but also the complexity of each plant being implemented.

In our experience, implementations are most successful when the company implements the more basic functionality quickly and focus on optimizing the most important resources first. This means you begin using the system as soon as possible, and then increase scope by either implementing more plants with basic functionality, or adding more functionality for the plants that are already implemented. This delivers value faster and gives your people time to learn gradually.

This leads to another important topic.

Paying Only for What You Use

With most production scheduling software, you have to buy the application and pay the full amount no matter what functionality you actually need. This leaves the companies that are using only the more basic application functionality paying too much.

Recognizing this, we have come up with incremental pricing, so you can get started small—using the more basic functionality and then increase the use of our application as you move from the basic package to the more advanced packages, paying more only when that functionality is used.

At the most advanced level we offer, we include things like Financial Optimization and Lot Controlled Planning, but these functionalities are best implemented when the more basic areas of our functionality have been mastered.

This allows companies to move at their own pace and pay for only what they use. It also makes our software affordable for companies that are only interested in using the more basic functionality—which is still leaps and bounds above manual Excel-based scheduling.

Reducing the Risk of a Production Scheduling Implementation

These approaches, from designing around POC’s and implementation speed to charging on a per plant basis, to incremental pricing tied to extra functionality, means we are one of the easiest production-scheduling vendors to work with, and we have one of the lowest risk levels in the market. Our customers literally only begin paying any significant amount of money when they are gaining significant value from our software.

Our pricing ties our success to the success of our customers. We don’t benefit from selling software that is used to a limited scope. We don’t benefit from lengthy implementation timelines. We want our customers using our software efficiently in as many plants as possible and using as much of our functionality as they can readily absorb.

For example, our Essentials offering for a single plant is $1,500 per month per plant. This allows any company to implement our software and find out if it pays for itself, and to do so at a minimal cost and minimal effort. The primary limitation to getting a single plant up on our software is the data and human resources that you can provide. Fortunately, most companies these days already have most of the data they need to support the basic functionality and the human effort is usually only a few hours per week. What is really holding people back from making this crucial improvement is the realization of how easy and affordable it really is.

Conclusion

We hope that this article has effectively explained how we have designed an implementation approach and pricing to fit with the needs of our customers. We are committed to changing the perception and reality of how long it takes to get production-scheduling software implemented.

We have some of the most flexible, advanced, and usable functionality in the production-scheduling market. However, we can also cater to companies that just want to take the first step and use the more basic functionalities—and want a reasonable improvement from where they are currently. If you want to learn if we may be a fit for your company and challenges don’t hesitate to contact us.