Production scheduling has become a must for operations that want to take their production to the next level. It shows how resources, events, and processes are allocated to create products, allowing you to have greater visibility into what is happening on your shop floor.
Historically, production scheduling was done on hand-written boards or with Excel spreadsheets. It was tedious and time-consuming, but most importantly, inefficient production scheduling led to missed deadlines, reduced efficiency, and complicated processes. Maintaining an up-to-date shop floor production schedule was difficult and costly, so decisions were made based on inaccurate data. Oftentimes, manual scheduling could not account for changes in personnel, order delays, or other unexpected factors, ultimately impacting the ability to fulfill orders on time.
Today, production scheduling has become more complex than ever, and using an Excel spreadsheet to manage it can be overwhelming. Small inefficiencies that you may have not noticed in your spreadsheets can result in bottlenecks in your production line – impacting your overall business, frustrating your customers, and stressing out your employees as they struggle to keep up with the orders. That is why innovative automated production scheduling software was created to help modern operations like yours stay flexible and maximize efficiency. Intelligent planning tools can provide you with accurate tracking and greater visibility of raw materials, employees, workstations, processes, and supplies that you need to make smarter data-driven decisions. Those bottlenecks that could have caused a slow down or shut down in your production line are a thing of the past with these latest scheduling innovations.
Modern scheduling systems are user-friendly with intuitive drag and drop interfaces that make scheduling a breeze. As orders are created from estimates, required materials, machine set-up, and run hours are seamlessly downloaded to your job boards. Job start dates are calculated against the available machine capacity, providing your team with realistic deadlines. Additionally, the dynamic visual schedule boards make it even easier for your team to:
- Keep up with demand
- Prevent idle time
- Reduce scheduling errors
- Generate accurate deadlines
- Reduce transport and storage costs
- Identify inefficiencies on your shop floor
- Get your products to your customers on time
An essential step in your production planning is forecasting to project your future needs like material sourcing, job allocation, transport, and more. Automated scheduling software can give you the tools to operate with more agility and flexibility so you can adapt to changing production environments by accurately predicting demand forecasting. Data-driven decisions can be incorporated into your production planning and scheduling by modeling what-if scenarios.
Thinking ahead and anticipating situations like high demand and shortfall allows you to create optimized schedules that balance productivity, efficiency, and delivery performance while identifying inefficient spots in your production line. By optimizing schedules using data and accurate forecasts, you can keep your plant running at peak performance.
Reduce Labor Costs, Improve Team Communication, and Streamline Production Planning
Automate and visualize your production scheduling with interactive Gantt charts built to improve workflow efficiency. With Advantzware’s Scheduling module, schedulers can simply drag and drop job cards on the Gantt chart to set priorities and plan the optimal schedule for your plant. Advantzware’s Browser Schedule Viewer enables all your employees to view updated snapshots of the schedule board and machine capacity to keep everyone on the same page. We can help you seamlessly integrate these modules into your ERP system to optimize your operations with intelligent production scheduling.