Advanced Planning & Scheduling: Meet customer needs at a lower cost
Demand Solutions Advanced Planning & Scheduling is a powerful, easy-to-use production scheduling solution for generating accurate schedules that take into account constraints around machines, personnel, tooling and inventory. It enables manufacturers to balance material, capacity, and shop floor schedules simultaneously to meet customer demands on time — and at the lowest possible cost.
With Advanced Planning & Scheduling you can:
- Gain a full 360-degree view of your company’s planning and production status
- Grow revenue with shorter lead times and reliable promise dates that allow for more on-time deliveries and better customer service
- Cut costs by significantly reducing inventories, overtime, expediting and time spent updating spreadsheets
- Create accurate, real-time production schedules that your whole company can rely on
- Make informed decisions with full understanding of their impact
- Predict the resources needed and completion time for each job
- Adjust and respond to changes quickly and easily with real-time tracking and performance indicators
- Plan across multiple facilities while managing critical manufacturing constraints
Migrate data easily to a flexible planning solution
Demand Solutions Advanced Planning & Scheduling is flexible enough to meet the specific needs of your organization. The intuitive user interface and robust functionality built on the Microsoft .NET architecture allow you to deploy quickly and achieve immediate value. This rough cut capacity planning solution is fully integrated with other Demand Solutions planning tools such as Forecast Management and Requirements Planning — or you can use it as a standalone solution to pull data from any ERPsystem, spreadsheet, or database.
When you combine Advanced Planning & Scheduling with Demand Solutions Forecast Management and Requirements Planning solutions, it uses planned orders from Requirements Planning to simultaneously plan material and capacity. That means you can support customer requirements while minimizing the impact on manufacturing resources such as tools, machines and workforce.
This efficient production scheduling solution identifies mismatches (such as shortages and overages) between supply and demand — even those that are months away. Such visibility gives you ample time to adjust your purchasing plans and manufacturing capacities.
Increase Collaboration with Your Suppliers
Visual Scheduling
- Manage all your constraints while the schedule takes into account materials, machines, labor and tooling
- Customize charts to visually depict schedules with powerful Resource Gantt and Job Gantt features
- Move orders around easily while always respecting constraints and automatically rescheduling other jobs, using an exclusive “finite” Drag-and-Drop feature
- Visualize resource utilization and availability with Gantt Charts and Capacity Plan graphs and grid
- See problems in advance with a red highlighting feature that identifies bottleneck operations
Powerful Optimization Engine
- Drive efficient production 24/7 with optimization rules that allow you to schedule based on your goals and production requirements
- Balance between any combination of due dates, priority, revenue, WIP reduction, setup time reduction, work remaining, and more with easy slider-adjustable, resource-specific rules
- Minimize Work-In-Progress inventory and maximize output with JIT (Just in Time) and Theory of Constraints bottleneck scheduling
Multi-User and Multi-Plant Collaboration
- Work collaboratively and cohesively with any number of planners at the same time
- Manage schedules simultaneously — allowing each planner to focus on the operations they know best
- Schedule on your own terms — by work center, department, facility, product line or customer
What-If Impact Analysis
- Predict outcomes quickly and make informed decisions based on real and experimental schedules
- Graph and track schedule quality by using Key Performance Indicators
- Create multiple scenarios for comparing the main schedule against experimental schedules
- Undo/Redo user actions for safe evaluation of alternatives
Real-Time Schedules
- View the most up-to-date schedule at all times as the system enables real-time updates
- Use printed schedules or live dispatch lists directly from your system on the shop floor
- Schedule simple, single-operation jobs all the way up to many-to-many operation flows easily and accurately
Sales and Operations Planning
- See inventory projections that take into account variables such as On-Hand Inventory, Sales Orders, Forecasts, Transfer Orders, Purchase Orders and Production Orders
- Avoid lost sales by easily identifying potential inventory backlogs that the system highlights in red
- Predict when materials will run out in time to order replenishments
- Identify the impact of capacity shortages on Forecasts and Sales Orders
Reliable, Accurate and Easy to Use
With Demand Solutions Advanced Planning & Scheduling, organizations can increase revenue and optimize resources with one integrated solution for rough cut capacity planning. This production scheduling solution is perfect for manufacturers — it’s affordable, easy-to-use and yields fast return on investment.
