Production Scheduling Reinvented. Ditch your Scheduling. Keep your ERP
Despite all of the time, money, and effort invested into ERP systems many manufacturers are still using Excel and other manual methods to manage production. It’s not that the software is bad, the software does exactly what it was designed to do – use a finite capacity scheduling algorithm to schedule production. It is understandable that if you are giving your ERP system inaccurate information, it will produce bad outcomes. So the natural tendency is to focus on improving the detail and accuracy of the information. Chaos Theory, often described as the ‘butterfly effect’ tells us that in complex systems, small changes can lead to vastly different outcomes. To say it another way, there are many variables and everything cannot be precisely known.
To summarise the traditional approach, we Plan by running a capacity loading algorithm (Scheduling Program), which generates priories for the shop floor typically in the form of a Work To List. These are then sent out to production to Execute. Often production looks at these priorities generated by the computer program and comments, “They look a lot different to what we talked about in our production meeting”. Furthermore, change in production is common. Customers are always changing the due date, tooling breaks, or material does not show up when expected. Whatever priorities were generated by your ERP system are now obsolete. So we then go outside of our scheduling systems to manage the complexity of production and to simply determine what we should work on.
In contrast, Protected Flow Manufacturing (PFM) completely flips the traditional approach of ‘Plan, Prioritize, Execute’ to ‘Prioritize, Execute, Plan’. Instead of a computer program trying to prioritise and establish priorities. PFM uses a simple, powerful, real-time priority that has production maximizing its capability to deliver all orders on time.
Priority – focuses production on the orders with the greatest risk of being late.
Execute – focuses the available capacity on the highest priority at that instant.
Plan – Simulates executing priorities into the future to gain insight into Load vs Capacity, Bottlenecks, predicted completion dates, and material constraints.
Go further by simulating what-if scenarios to compare projected on-time delivery, revenue, throughput, taking on that big order, or purchasing a new machine. Allowing you to assess different alternatives to maximise your organisation’s performance.
The rest of your ERP system probably works quite well. So keep it! Too much time, effort and money is required to replace it. PFM quickly and easily replaces the scheduling and execution side of your ERP system. This is the part that helps manufacturers get work through their organisation faster, reduces WIP, improves On-Time Delivery, and allows you to make promises your customers believe so they keep on coming back.
We love manufacturing and believe manufacturing fuels sustainable economic growth that we all benefit from. We want to get this message, that is a better way to manage production out there to create viable and financially sustainable companies. This is why we sponsored the manufacturing solutions zone. Visit us at our stand MS496, and we can talk about how we can help you overcome your challenges.
Stand MS496