One of the most important features of an APS system is the ability to integrate with an existing ERP. You need a way to accurately pull in work orders, inventory, machines, and tons of other data. Furthermore, you must be able to keep up with the constant changes being made every day in a typical ERP system. What use is an APS system if it’s scheduling week-old data?

Thankfully, PlanetTogether has a way to automate its most essential functions– Import, Optimize, and Publish/Export. You can set these up to run as often as every 30 seconds. This way, any time a change is made in the ERP system, it will be automatically imported to PlanetTogether (within 30 seconds), optimized, and published. For example, if an output quantity on a job gets increased in the ERP, that change will automatically get reflected in PlanetTogether, the run time of the job will be adjusted and scheduled accordingly, and any reports will be updated with a new finish date on that job.

Of course, some planners don’t need their schedule data updating every half minute. In some industries, it might make sense to have an Import and Optimize run once every morning at 6:00am, and only run a Publish once the planner has made all his manual adjustments. The great thing about the Automatic Actions option is that it is very flexible.

To enable Automatic Actions, the APS.net Scheduling Agent service must be started. Also, the intervals in which to run them must be set up in the APS.net Config Manager. You can choose to either run the actions automatically every set number of seconds, or set the specific times you want them to run.

And don’t worry, the Import, Optimize and Export options will still work at any time when used manually in PlanetTogether. =)

It’s essential for an Advanced Planning and Scheduling software to provide flexible and powerful tools for handling multi-level BOMs. After all, this is where scheduling gets complicated and even though MRP systems do a good job letting planners know what material is needed,  they fail to take into account important capacity constraints. Sometimes this shortcoming results in invaluable data (from a scheduling point of view) such as inaccurate required dates and priorities. The fact that with most MRP systems, there is no link between these lower level and higher level work orders (sometimes referred to as child and parent work orders) makes it even harder to produce optimal schedules.

It’s important to have accurate need dates and priorities on work orders of all levels, specially if you want to take full advantage of a rule based optimization engine such as the one in PlanetTogether. (To find out more about PlanetTogether’s optimizer read this blog post by my colleague)

With PlanetTogether, planners have the option to dynamically set the need date, priority and hot flag on child work orders based on the data on (parent) work orders they will be supplying materials to. The optimization engine calculates material requirements and corresponding required dates, then looks for work orders producing these items and makes sure the need date and priorities are set so that the material is ready “just-in-time” for the next work order to use.

Using this feature, or trying it in “What-If” mode is as easy as three check boxes:

In larger plants, regardless of industry, downstream resource availability can become an important constraint in scheduling. For example, you may have 10 production lines that all perform the same function, and 15 packaging lines that can all potentially package the same finished good. However, due to the plant layout, material coming off Production Line 1 may only be able to flow to Pack Lines 1 or 2. The APS system must be able to take these constraints into account when scheduling. PlanetTogether has a feature called “Resource Connectors” that does just that.

The basic setup of “Resource Connectors” just involves defining the relationships among your resources (machines, lines, tools, etc.). So in our example, we would define the two relationships Prod Line 1 -> Pack Line 1 and Prod Line 1 -> Pack Line 2. This information can also be imported from an ERP system.

Each Resource Connection relationship can also contain information about the transit time between the resources. Pack Line 2 might be farther away from our Production Line and thus it would take longer for the material to get there.

PlanetTogether’s Optimizer will automatically respect these rules when generating the Plant Schedule. The planner can override these rules if necessary (maybe machine maintenance requires an alternate Pack Line be used), but a flag will be displayed so they know they are breaking a scheduling rule. In the example below, the packaging operation was moved to an incompatible resource, so the operation shows a red flag with the message “Resource Connectors Violation.”

The best APS systems minimize manual scheduling by thoroughly modeling factory constraints, yet allow for exceptions by letting the planner override those constraints when necessary. Flags make this process much simpler, so the planner doesn’t inadvertently produce an impossible schedule. What other flags do you think would be beneficial for manual overrides?

Generation and maintenance of planned orders are an important part of the material planning process and they should be incorporated into the scheduler to provide the most realistic schedule. Below are a few notes I took away from a recent implementation.

For starters, planned orders which are not firmed up can change very frequently, so you might want to leave them out of the schedule for stability and only schedule firm planned orders.

Secondly, once the firm planned order is turned into an actual order in MRP, the unique key that identified the planned order is gone and the new actual order has a completely different key. This means that, to the scheduler software the actual order imported is a brand new order. To overcome this problem, PlanetTogether allows you to import an “Old Key” field associated with the new order; through this “Old Key” PlanetTogether will know the actual order is replacing the planned order and preserve scheduling information such as start and end dates.

Also, because planned orders are different in nature than actual orders, we want to make sure we implement the necessary visual hints so the scheduler can easily distinguish the two types of orders.

Often one of the key goals a client has in implementing an Advanced Planning and Scheduling tool is to automate the scheduling process as much as possible. Many planners use complicated Excel spreadsheets to schedule their machines and labor while keeping track of multiple constraints in their head. PlanetTogether contains many features that help model these constraints automatically, so the planner has to do very little, if any, manual scheduling. Here I’ve outlined just one of the many constraints that are especially useful to process manufacturers. More to come!

 Maximum and Minimum Capacity on Batch Resources

A process manufacturing plant will commonly contain a large number of batch resources, such as tanks, that can hold varying levels of product. For example, one tank may hold up to 5,000 pounds while another tops out at 2,500.  Each Resource in PlanetTogether has a field called MaxQty that can be populated to reflect these constraints. When this value is set on a resource, it prevents any batch that is over that amount from scheduling there.

There is also a field called MinQty. Perhaps your plant has a large tank that holds 5,000 pounds, but for efficiency’s sake you never fill it with batches less than 4,000. MinQty can be populated on this Resource to reflect such a constraint. These properties can be set in the Resource Configurator:

 Next time the planner imports a new job and optimizes, PlanetTogether will automatically respect those constraints. No more headaches trying to remember which tanks can hold what and how much!

This is just one of the many options an APS system like PlanetTogether offers to help minimize time spent manually scheduling resources. What are some other process manufaturing constraints your clients could benefit from automating?

PlanetTogether’s Optimizer tool gives the planner lots of options for deciding what factors are most important when creating a schedule. For example, a planner might decide that meeting Job need dates is the first factor to consider. Then perhaps he wants to favor Jobs marked “Hot” and then create a schedule that minimizes the setup hours incurred by changeovers and cleanouts. His Optimize rule might look something like this:

This looks pretty good. But in order for the Optimizer to do the best job it can, it’s important that the data it crunches is accurate. The planner and consultant should work closely to ensure that need dates are correct and that the setup tables are complete. Also, there should be a good priority system in place. If a too-large percentage of jobs are getting marked “Hot,” then the rules specified above won’t be as useful. The same logic can be carried over to any of the other Optimize options, such as “Highest Revenue” or “Group by Customer.” The Optimizer is a very powerful tool, but in order to get the most out of it, the data that your Rule looks to should be as comprehensive and accurate as possible.