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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]