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. =)