Introducing a Breakthrough in APS Technology

ADF/APS ©

Advanced Descriptive Framework for Advanced Planning and Scheduling (ADF/APS) is a new level of Technology that dramatically increases the capabilities of the current APS Standards. This level incorporates descriptive features that model production activities more accurately than previous APS applications. Here are a few examples of the new standard introduced by Unique Scheduling Solutions.

• No time buckets. This means there is no rounding up or down for activity durations that are not an exact number of pre-defined buckets like hours, days, shifts, etc. It is not a spreadsheet derivative. This alone provides a more accurate representation of real capacity.
  
  
• Activities that require resources like machines, operators, tools, transporters, locations, and materials for only part of their duration. For example, some processing steps might need an operator at the beginning and end, but not in the middle of its duration. This intermittent usage can be modeled correctly and applies to all resources including materials. This accommodates realistic robotic assistance and leads to more accurate capacity calculations.

• Activities that require multiple resources in differing amounts during their execution. The requirement for several resources to support any production activity can be described by different quantities at different times within its duration.

• Automated determination of alternative resource assignment possibilities where all time-varying requirements and availability profiles are considered. This eliminates the guess and check procedure inherent in checking one resource at a time (drag-and-drop) thereby reducing replanning time by a substantial amount.

• Scheduling not only forward and backward, but also in no time order. This accelerates ‘hole filling’ during the ever-present schedule revision task.

• Automated blending of multiple objectives under the scheduler’s control. This accommodates different ‘best practices’ and is ideal for machine learning.

• A descriptive framework that is completely domain (silo) independent. It handles discrete and process manufacturing as well as project-oriented planning and scheduling in any product environment.

• A completely integrated description of top-level planning and detailed scheduling with the same dataset. A single descriptive model can be used for many purposes including strategic planning, what-if planning, capacity planning, execution-level scheduling, and schedule revision merely by re-setting a few parameters.

• Provision of detailed data to feed analytics and KPIs. These computations provide a new level of accuracy about the realities of production. Better and more rapid decision-making!

The new ADF/APS generation is a completely revised formulation; a framework that’s extremely flexible (agile) and adaptable to all production environments from the simplest to the most complex. It is not a patched add-on to current APS formulations. With unique architecture and finite-capacity logic, it is idealized for describing today’s production environments and determining the correct values for key performance indicators (KPIs).

© Unique Scheduling Solutions, 2023