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…
Scheduling and the New Generation ERP ERP vendors and their investors, especially those focused on manufacturing, are scrambling to upgrade and retool their offerings. A recent Wall Street Journal article (June 10-11, page B9, “Less Flashy Business Software Draws Investors” by Angus Loften) included this quote from a prominent manager: "Most people are at the 20 to 25-year mark with…
Current Challenges to Enterprise Software Nearly 150 vendors of Enterprise Resource Planning applications (ERP) compete to stay useful as digitization makes new data available and technology impacts production processes. To stay current, the ERP providers must adapt their offerings. Here are three current challenges facing ERP vendors. How to use Data From the Shop Floor Collection of real-time data related…
Closing the Loop on MES and Lights-Out Production A White Paper © 2022 Unique Scheduling Solutions, LLC. September 2022 Recently, the Gartner Group published a white paper entitled “Lights-Out Production will be a Reality by 2025.“ They describe the concept of lights-Out manufacturing as “equipping shop floor equipment with sensors and monitoring devices that communicate with analytic and predictive automation…
Do You Really Need to Save Seconds in Scheduling? YES! Want to know how to translate a second into dollars? It all comes down to calculating your scheduling down to the second. Many applications don’t even use minutes to compute schedules. They use time “buckets” of five- or 15-minute intervals–or even hours or days. You’ll see this “buckets of time”…
The Evolution of Scheduling If you’ve ever watched Jimmy Fallon do any of his Evolution of Dance bits, you’ll notice a couple things: We Americans started out simple, moving our bodies out of necessity with a basic step-touch, then curiously to more complex moves to accommodate more complicated beats (hello, Break Dancing), and we’ve ultimately swung back to a more…
The Pillars of Success (and Making the Case for Having an ATP Calculator Handy) If the old proverb “Necessity is the mother of invention,” then surely the need to provide accurate promise dates is the mother of finite capacity scheduling. It’s absolutely true. Let’s start with the basics: Any good business analyst will tell you that success often rests on…
The ABCs of Scheduling: A Return to the Basics: Previously, in this BLOG, we have discussed the subtleties of various scheduling applications. A good app must accommodate many capabilities—some obvious, some not-so-obvious. That said, let’s review the basic capabilities that should be at the heart of any scheduling app. These are the core features that form the framework onto which detailed capabilities can be…
Flexible and Accommodating: Can Your Scheduler Do That? It’s all very simple when you explain your manufacturing process to your mother/neighbor/in-laws, right? And it is–normally. You manufacture widgets. Normally, a widget run produces two dozen widgets. The five-step process goes something like this: Set-up the widget-making machines Perform step A Perform step B Perform step C Take-down and clean the…
May The Force Be with You! The question here is a good one: How do you make the impossible, possible? Recently, a product producer wanted the capability to “force” a production sequence onto an already heavily-loaded schedule. This request was motivated by the desire to satisfy his customer’s delivery date despite the fact that his scheduler said the product couldn’t…
Decision Support Versus Decision-Making: A Trap for Schedulers We all love automation. How can we not? Our coffee makers brew our morning joe at the exact temperature we prefer each morning, we have a customized news feed in the palm of our hands to bring us only the genres of news we like to see—in fact, we have nearly every…
Scheduling Is Not Your Problem–Rescheduling Is! What takes longer: building a schedule or revising a schedule?? Most operations analysts believe revising a schedule takes more time.. But why? The answer is that things seldom go as planned. Feeding the actual circumstances back into the planning process necessitates replanning. This feedback loop is apparently ignored by some of the scheduling tool…
Confessions of an Optimizer: When is “excellent” good enough? As we all know, an optimal solution is best when it comes to any scheduling operation. But is optimal always practical? Not necessarily. If you have an environment with frequently changing requirements like most operational situations, you may need to shoot for “excellent” rather than “optimal.” Optimizing a schedule involves a…
Challenges Accepted: What Are Yours? Here are 10 real world scenarios I’ve encountered recently that require some serious know-how in order to set up a scheduling application. (Of course, the application itself must have the descriptive and solution capabilities to handle the complex scenarios.) Perhaps you can relate to something in this list. Some of my activities are a week…
You Can’t Steer the Ship by Looking at Its Wake: When ERP Is Not Enough Don’t buy an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system expecting it to be a complete management decision-support tool. If producing something is the essence of your business, then you must ‘produce’ in the most efficient way possible. Right? Working with information that an ERP system gathers …
Scheduling Done Right and the Bottom Line Here’s the essence of a conversation I had recently with a colleague: Colleague: Did you notice that the “Acme Anvil Company” had three different departments doing planning and scheduling? (I changed its name for privacy.) Me: Yes! They had a planning department that supported their sales people by supplying promise dates for new orders. They…
Searching for Common Ground in Multi-Level Scheduling Many organizations schedule at different levels of management, which can add another layer of complexity to the process. For example: A manufacturer has a production planning department that builds schedules based on a capacity model that describes their capabilities in terms of “pools” of equivalent machines, work stations, and people with common skills.…
The FAST scheduler can now handle resources with attributes such as size, status, location, capacity, — or any other user-defined parameter. Activities can require resources that involve these attributes. For example, an activity can require a room with at least a specified capacity, or a person with a particular skill set. You can even build combinations of these qualifications using…
Beware of Stovepipe Scheduling A doctor’s office schedules appointments for their physicians using an application built specifically for medical practices, but they find out that there aren’t enough examining rooms to support that schedule. A baking plant makes products in batches that must be finished once they are started. They use a foodservice scheduling software that accommodates that requirement, but…
What’s the Priority? Should you schedule the most important things first? If you have several activities to schedule, it seems like a logical strategy to schedule the higher priority ones before the lesser priority ones, right? Well that doesn’t always work out. In fact, it is rarely the best strategy for finding the best schedule. If you’re able to maneuver…
Latest News:
- Introducing a Breakthrough in APS Technology
- Scheduling and the New Generation ERP
- Current Challenges to Enterprise Software
- Closing the Loop on MES and Lights-Out Production
- Do You Really Need to Save Seconds in Scheduling? YES!
- The Evolution of Scheduling
- The Pillars of Success (and Making the Case for Having an ATP Calculator Handy)
- The ABCs of Scheduling: A Return to the Basics: