Advanced Planning And Scheduling Aps Overview

Editor's Notes

• #3: Thank you for joining us for the next 15 minutes to see how PlanetTogether Advanced Planning and Scheduling can directly impact your bottom line through collaboration among sales, production, planning, purchasing, maintenance and management.
• #4: Planning and scheduling activities can be extremely difficult to manage for companies that produce a variety of products, are operating near or above capacity, have multiple manufacturing facilities, are equipment-intensive or require skilled labor. Perhaps you can relate to some or many of the issues presented here, each of which can have a significant impact on the bottom line.Allow enough time for viewer to read through the issues and then advance to the next page
• #5: Collaboration among multiple planners and/or manufacturing facilities can add to the complexities involved with planning and scheduling. If you are faced with some of these challenges, it may be time to consider advanced planning and scheduling.Again give the viewer time to read through the issues
• #6: The more resources you have to manage, the more complex and overwhelming the planning and scheduling process becomes.Machines may require significant set-up or change-over and unlike labor resources can not easily be added to the production line. Certain jobs may only be allowed to run on certain equipment or need routine maintenance or go down.Tooling, Molds and Dies can add to the complexity of scheduling equipment.Labor may be a constraint based on certain skill levels, or you may want to plan future requirements for long term staffing considerations.In a traditional MRP and scheduling environment Material requirements are resolved by MRP and capacity requirements are handled by the scheduling system. With this two phased approach the production schedule can get “out of phase” with the material requirements. For example a job can get released to the shop floor only to find out there is a raw material shortage, or a job gets moved on the schedule, but the “predecessor” jobs did not get re-scheduled accordingly, creating a material shortage of excess Work-in-process.
• #7: Let’s look at a simple process. In this example our routing calls for a saw, paint and assemble operation. Each operation requires one or more resources.We have 2 saws, however one can only handle wood up to a certain thickness. The other saw is capable of handling any size. For certain jobs a special saw blade is required.The paint booth requires laborers with certain skills and there is significant set-up when the paint color changes from darker to lighter color.The last operation is the assembly process. We only need to know that three people are on the assembly line to make sure we have enough people available to work today.
• #8: Our little scenario seems simple enough except for the fact that different departments can have conflicting goals and management typically has multiple objectives that need to be met.Maximizing profit may be a difficult goal to meet when orders are late. The planner is going to expedite the job, work overtime or do whatever it takes and can not necessarily see the impact on profit objectives
• #9: How difficult can it be to manage the planning and scheduling activities involved in building a birdhouse? Let’s find out.Our finished product consists of a birdhouse and a bird feeder. There are two lines, one for the house and one for the feeder. The process is identical for each with the exception that the house can only use saw #1. The feeder could actually go on either saw #1 or saw #2.
• #10: Four orders come in and the jobs are scheduled according to the order due date.
• #11: 1 week later, we are in real trouble! One of the orders is already late. The red bird feeder is sitting in the final assembly area, however there is no red birdhouse.As we work our way back, we start to see all sorts of inefficiencies and bottlenecks. Remember our paint booth requires significant set up time when we switch from dark to light color paint, but the planner failed to take the color into consideration when scheduling jobs 4, 6 and 7.There are 3 jobs lined up on sander number 1 while the 2nd sander stands idol. Finally to make our day, saw #2 goes down.
• #12: Now let’s see what happens when we optimize our schedule to reflect all of the objectives we have of minimizing set-up, maximizing profit and meeting on-time deliveries.The bird feeder (job 2) gets moved to saw #1, when saw #2 goes down. Jobs 3 and 5 are offloaded to sander #2 to eliminate the bottleneck on sander #1. And finally job 6 is moved up to eliminate set-up time. The end result is lower costs, and higher profits making sure that none of the other jobs are late.
• #13: PlanetTogether Advanced Planning & Scheduling resolves material, labor and capacity constraints simultaneously by looking at all of the required and available resources and the specific capabilities of those resources.The schedule is optimized to meet customer service objectives, operational efficiencies, cost containment and profit objectives.It is a collaborative tool that allows planners to quickly respond to disruptions on the shop floor and immediately assess the impact by looking at specific metrics such as on-time deliveries, profit, etc.Planners can make changes to the schedule with confidence knowing that they can “undo” a schedule change or work in a “what-if” environment before committing the change.
• #14: Who in your organization stands to benefit from PlanetTogether advanced planning & scheduling?Sales will have accurate order dates to communicate to their customers.Detailed, actionable schedules will be dispatched to production.Planning is able to efficiently and effectively manage capacity loads.Material requirements are communicated to purchasing based on realistic schedulesScheduled and unscheduled down-time and set-up scheduled are communicated to the maintenance departmentManagement can forecast future cash flows
• #15: The bottom line is that every company wants to decrease expenses, increase revenue and increase cash flow. PlanetTogether Advanced Planning & Scheduling can potentially help you improve the bottom line by:Reducing production cycle timesImproving machine utilizationReducing inventoriesIncreasing on-time deliveriesReducing customer stock-outsReducing Order-to-Cash and Cash to Cash conversion cycles
• #16: How does the production schedule get communicated to the shop floor? Are planners spending time managing spreadsheets or in daily meetings with production, sales and purchasing?
• #17: PlanetTogether Advanced Planning & Scheduling is the missing piece in your current planning process.  Fully integrated with your other systems it will enable you to share accurate dates with your sales and production teams, quickly adjust to changes, and execute according to schedule.
• #18: Call to learn more about how Advanced Planning & Scheduling can work for your business.