April 10, 2024
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…
















