After understanding its capabilities, planners in the manufacturing world view PlanetTogether's software as the key to floor efficiency. They can spend hours upon hours of their day manually creating schedules and spreadsheets to optimize factory output.
PlanetTogether's planning and scheduling software allows planners to focus on more strategic work. They simply feed the software their variables, and in turn, the software creates a schedule for them. This convenience enables the planner to use his or her time to make the types of changes only a human can make. PlanetTogether's software serves as a data hub for information, an aggregator of analytics, and contributor to critical decision making.
Before the existence of planning and scheduling software, the plant supervisor spent almost all their time figuring out who’s going to do what on the production floor. Through the implementation of PlanetTogether, a typical scheduler or planner will witness a 70% reduction in their workload. It’s not about changing the machines or what they’re doing, rather, it’s about using them more efficiently.
Communication is also enhanced. Planning and scheduling software directly connects the planners with manufacturing. Therefore, any changes made by the planner are immediately visible to the manufacturing side.
Planners utilize a myriad of tools found within the software to optimize their planning and scheduling processes. Some of the more popular tools feature the ability to adjust schedules visually or from a grid, as well as the ability to make changes and immediately see the impact of those changes on customer orders. Such insight provides planners with valuable decision-making data needed to make informed business decisions. These what-if scenarios are the go-to-resource of a planner/scheduler; it allows them to run hypothetical simulations without publishing the changes and affecting the shop floor.
Dispatching is the step in which all the work on paper is then turned into production. This feature of the software makes sure that tools, equipment, and people are prepared, while also ensuring that production is moving according to the instructions. Overall, dispatching is the main function that allows production to flow accordingly while also taking all the factors associated with manufacturing into consideration.
Once dispatching is applied, expediting is the final step within the production control process. This feature conducts analysis on production and keeps track of any inefficiencies and waste that is created and attempts to locate ways to further improve the process. As this process is completed, the entire cycle restarts and production come closer and closer to reaching maximum efficiency.
Advanced planning and scheduling software offers various benefits and capabilities that can take your production to the next level. Some of the features of advanced planning and scheduling software include the following:
• Finite Capacity Scheduling
• What-if Scenarios
• Drag and Drop
For more information on the features of PlanetTogether’s APS, click here!
For planners within the manufacturing industry, easier scheduling is what they’ve always wanted, they just didn’t know there was a tool to help.
Learn more about what PlanetTogether has to offer planners and schedulers here.
In this video, we walk through how planners and IT teams can successfully collaborate to implement PlanetTogether Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) software. Learn how to align goals, prepare data, connect APS to ERP and other systems, and support planners so they get the full value from the tool.
Key takeaways from this video:
How planners and IT can align goals for APS implementation
What data and integrations IT should prepare to support accurate schedules
How PlanetTogether APS enables multi-user collaboration between planners, IT, and operations
Ways to use APS to reduce manual scheduling work and improve communication with the shop floor
Right now, many planners are buried in spreadsheets—rebuilding schedules, crunching numbers, and trying to keep up with constant changes from the floor. PlanetTogether APS changes that, shifting planners from manual firefighting to strategic decision-making and collaboration with operations and IT.
Download our one-page “Before & After: Free Up Your Day with APS” infographic to see how advanced planning and scheduling software helps planners and schedulers:
Use it as a quick visual to align planners, IT, and operations around what better collaboration with APS actually looks like.