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?