Recently a partner asked what the “Planning” part of “Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS)” encompassed, and how was this different from Scheduling. It’s an interesting question, surely scheduling is a component of planning, but what other components are there, and how can PlanetTogether bring these together into a coherent concept?
The first component in Planning vs Scheduling is the timeframe. With scheduling, you can plot out released orders for the next couple weeks, but planning is looking at the long-term strategy. PlanetTogether was designed with both long-term planning and short-term scheduling in mind. With our MPS/MRP functionality, you can generate planned orders based on demand, rather than scheduling only released orders generated by your ERP system. This allows your plant to schedule months in advance, as opposed to only scheduling the next week or two. This provides you greater visibility to capacity or material bottlenecks, and any resource changes that are needed to satisfy customer demand. Many systems are unable to replan your schedule fast enough to generate long term, capacity optimized plans, but PlanetTogether can do it in a matter of minutes, saving your planners valuable time readjusting the schedule. A recent customer switched from another APS system because it took hours to plan three months, while PlanetTogether creates a full year plan in under 10 minutes.
While Scheduling is certainly an important aspect of Planning, it focuses on the near future. Using PlanetTogether, you can expand your schedule beyond the short-term to gain the visibility you need.
Related Capacity Planning Video
APS Resources
Topics: Advanced Planning and Scheduling, capacity planning, production planning, finite capacity, users, project management, APS, capacity, bottlenecks, constraint, resource, MRP
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