VISUAL's advanced planning & scheduling engine considers both material and capacity constraints when generating your shop resource schedule.
It provides you with the power to plan and achieve, on-time deliveries, you can quickly identify bottlenecks and constraints and leverage this knowledge to increase throughput and profitability.
The production planner's life can be very frustrating, using excel spreadsheets and whiteboards, they constantly try to juggle all of the customer demands, while at the same time trying to consider the availability of capacity, materials and of other resources such as tools, jigs and fixtures.
And by the time they have managed to squeeze everything in, and finally come out with the plan, it is already outdated and they have to start all over again.
This is the daily reality for planners at many order-driven businesses who are constrained by their capacity and have "fluid" schedules.
Manual scheduling typically uses "planning windows" of one day or even one week, meaning that the planner will for example create a list of jobs that each resource needs to complete today, or this week. It is then normally left up to the line leader or supervisor to decide in which order to run these jobs, and this is what results in longer leadtimes, high WIP levels and lots of queueing time.
Let's say there is a simple work order to be completed with just 2 operations, the first one is Milling and the second one is Grinding.
Milling starts work at 8 o'clock on Monday morning and finishes it at 12 o'clock the same day. However the Grinding Machine which it requires next, is already working on another job which won't be finished until Tuesday lunchtime as the Grinding supervisor has planned his job list in a different order than Milling.
This means that the job is sat on the shop floor doing nothing for one day, and this is what increases your WIP levels, extends your manufacturing leadtimes and has other undesirable effects.
But this is not the fault of the Planner, There are simply too many dynamic factors for the human mind to consider, and this is where Visual can help you.
Unlike the manual planner who plans daily or weekly job lists, Visual plans to the minute, and the goal is to schedule every job to be completed on-time based on the availability of capacity, materials and other resources, and with minimal queue times.
So rather than giving a list of jobs to the supervisors and letting them decide the order in which to run them, Visual produces a "Shop Dispatch Report", one report per supervisor, and this tells them not only the order in which to run the jobs, but also when they should be started and when they should be completed based on the standard times.
This will provide the following benefits:
Constantly changing production schedules are a daily reality in many order-driven businesses. Before the production planner has even finished and printed the schedule, he is already working on new changes which are occurring dynamically.
Typical reasons for this are:
VISUAL manages all these changes for you dynamically, in the background, by monitoring changes to the customer demands, the availability of materials, the availability of capacity, and importantly what is ACTUALLY happening on the shop floor against what was planned to happen.
This closed-loop system ensures that you are constantly taking into account all of the factors that effect your schedule You can re-prioritize work orders so that the scheduler will run any high priority jobs in front of normal or lower priority demands without having to adjust the original want dates, as well as group jobs with similar features in order to minimize setup times.
Unlike other ERP software, which isolate capacity planning from material planning, VISUAL uniquely combines material availability and capacity availability checking together using a time-based, holistic approach. This is now known commonly as APS or Advanced Planning & Scheduling.
Traditional MRP-type systems create a production plan that may be unrealistic because raw material or purchased components cannot be acquired in time to meet the available capacity, causing users to reserve capacity that will be wasted and presenting them with a falsely optimistic picture of on-time delivery capabilities.
These systems may also force you to create a capacity plan, then check it against a material plan, make adjustments, recheck against a new capacity plan, and recheck against a new material plan, and so forth in a never ending loop of frustration. VISUAL however, will produce a production plan that realistically reserves capacity for work only when the required materials and sub assembly components are available. The result is a production plan that is realistic, and one that can be achieved with your available resources.
VISUAL's group scheduling capabilities offer greater dimensions than those found in other systems. By referencing a single resource in a routing, the user may indicate that many resources are actually required to accomplish the work and that all must be available simultaneously for the work to be done.
As an example, when a piece of equipment and a skilled operator is required, plus one or more tools or fixtures to accomplish a single task, VISUAL makes sure that all of those resources are available before reserving capacity at any of them to accomplish a task.