Concurrent Planning & Scheduling for an Accurate Production Schedule

It is no secret that consumers' expectations are changing when it comes to fast delivery and low costs. Manufacturers are faced with the challenge of keeping up with those ever-changing demands. When mistakes are made during the planning process, the result is an inaccurate schedule leading to late orders, internal chaos, unhappy customers, and lost business.

Without making some changes to your planning process, it will be almost impossible to meet these customer demands and expectations. In order to meet those expectations, manufacturers must overcome two major problems:

1. Creating Accurate Production Plans: Manufacturers must create accurate production plans so that they can give accurate promise dates to their customers. 
2. React Quickly to Changes: Manufacturers must also be able to react quickly when something changes to that they can immediately tell customers how those changes will impact them.

Too often, manufacturing companies have production plans that get disconnected from the materials and capacity scheduling processes of the work centers. Tasks are scheduled at the work center level in time buckets. The problem here is that the schedule does not take into consideration the different run rates of the resources. In addition, the sequence of tasks is not clear - schedulers do not know exactly when a task will start.

These problems severely limit your ability to give customers accurate promise dates and to understand the impact of change on promise dates.

Concurrent Planning & Scheduling allows you to:

1. Commit quickly
2. Promise delivery dates realistically
3. React to disruptions efficiently
4. Deliver on-time reliably

With PlanetTogether's Advanced Planning and Scheduling software, you will be able to keep up with customer demands and maintain a competitive advantage.

PlanetTogether's Advanced Planning and Scheduling System

An Advanced Planning and Scheduling System quickly and automatically creates a concurrent production plan and schedule that takes into consideration all of the constraints, sequencing preferences, and management priorities you have.

Being able to plan and schedule together will allow for better coordination across departments. This can help reduce waste as all departments will have visibility in the number of items that are available and are being produced. 

PlanetTogether's Advanced Planning and Scheduling system allows you to have extended visibility between your scheduling, production, and procurement departments to keep demand and supply aligned to improve customer service and meet your delivery dates. It will also allow you to reduce your material costs while minimizing schedule disruptions.

Factory Digital Twin

PlanetTogether can create a detailed constraint-based model of your factory - a "Factory Digital Twin". This is an in-memory simulation of your factory that enables your software to predict future production times as it knows your resources, production rates, expected yields, and predicted product mix that will cause changeovers and queuing time.

Agile Re-Scheduling

In the occurrence of a disruption within the production facility, PlanetTogether will automatically re-schedule tasks for you in seconds. Without a powerful APS system, this would take long hours and even days spent scrambling to create a schedule that does not cause too many delays.

Plan In Advance

PlanetTogether can support high levels of data, which means that you have increased visibility over an extended scheduling horizon. Being able to create a schedule weeks, and even months, in advance will allow you to better plan your material purchasing, capacity loads, and staffing. 

Increased Communication and Visibility

You have the ability to share your production schedule throughout the organization. The shop floor operators can see the latest version of the schedule via live access to reports. Your planners, sales, and customer service teams have visibility in any changes occurring on the shop floor and can see ship dates and capacity loads in your ERP system. That means that everyone, including your customers, is informed and can plan based on the most up-to-date and accurate information possible.

Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) Software

Advanced Planning and Scheduling Softwares have become a must for modern-day manufacturing operations as customer demand for increased product assortment, fast delivery, and downward cost pressures become prevalent. These systems help planners save time while providing greater agility in updating ever-changing priorities, production schedules, and inventory plans. APS Systems can be quickly integrated with an ERP/MRP software to fill the gaps where these systems lack planning and scheduling flexibility, accuracy, and efficiency.

With APS you can:

• Create optimized schedules that balance production efficiency and delivery performance
• Maximize throughput on bottleneck resources to increase revenue
• Synchronize supply with demand to reduce inventories
• Provide company-wide visibility to resource capacity
• Enable scenario data-driven decision making

The implementation of an Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) Software will take your manufacturing operations to the next level of production efficiency by taking advantage of the operational data you already possess in your ERP system. APS is a step in the right direction of efficiency and lean manufacturing production enhancement. Try out a free trial or demo!