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What should a production scheduling software do?

Manufacturing companies use software to plan and schedule their production in an advanced way, in order to take maximum advantage of their plants while minimizing costs and risks. What are the features and aspects that such software must have?

What a production scheduling software must do

Each software is different and the most complete and advanced on the market have developed aspects that are useful to the planner to better manage the production schedule in a simple and fast way. However, there are some aspects that are essential and that must be guaranteed in any case; an effective production planning system should in fact:

  • Integrate easily and effectively with ERP and existing software;
  • Be configurable and scalable: the software must adapt to business processes and not the other way around, also allowing to support the company in the path of growth and change and not to represent a constraint;
  • Carry out simulations of future what-if scenarios;
  • Extreme calculation speed: simulating and visualizing the impacts must be done very quickly, in a time of a few seconds or a minute depending on the volumes;
  • Take into account internal constraints such as: materials, production capacity, multi-resource ,bottlenecks, buffers, etc.;
  • Take into account external constraints such as: delivery times, reliability of suppliers, etc.;
  • Be user-friendly and graphically simple, complete and effective;
  • Possess the algorithms and functionalities necessary and typical for the type of sector and production.

The effectiveness of these features strongly depends on the planning methods and planning tools used. Methods and tools are closely related: the review of the planning system requires the critical review of both.

 

Which planning software to choose?

It is not always easy to select a suitable software to plan your production and this is also because there is an increasing number of software houses that approach these issues. However, software of this type requires enormous experience in the sector and it is difficult for new entrants to reach maturity, much less in a few years. For this reason, the main vendors are divided into:
  1. Large software houses producing ERP;
  2. Medium-sized software houses focused on production control systems.
The former hardly create advanced software and do not have a strong specific experience in the sector; in most cases they create complex planning packages without advanced features. These solutions may be good for a first approach but they do not allow the company that adopts them to take the necessary step to make a difference.
 
The latter, on the other hand, are fully focused on the evolution of these systems by creating state-of-the-art software. In some cases, these software houses have tried to expand their product package by also developing MES solutions and other systems as a corollary. However, these solutions require very different technologies and knowledge from those required for production planning and scheduling, leading to a loss of focus from planning and scheduling systems. In addition, such corollary software leads to the creation of rigid structures between the different systems that hinder the achievement of excellent integration between the products offered and the software solutions already in use in the company. It should also be considered that these medium-sized software houses with a large number of products and technologies must divide investments for the different products and technologies other than production programming. The result of these difficulties is often a slow progress of APS solutions or even a mere maintenance of the characteristics of its products without concrete innovation.
 
Therefore, if you are looking for a solution that allows you to truly improve the performance of your production processes, that allows you to have a tangible financial and management impact and that is also a valid tool for the years to come, then it is better to rely on software houses totally dedicated to the planning and scheduling of production. These are the only ones able to follow the customer with a customer-centric approach and who have the ability to invest and innovate on the solutions offered. 

 

CyberPlan and its features

Cybertec has been active in the field of production planning and scheduling solutions for almost 30 years, which has allowed it to gather considerable experience in the field of production scheduling thanks to over 1,000 projects and 5,000 active users. During this time Cybertec has helped numerous manufacturing companies perform better. Every day, in fact, numerous companies active in every sector and with production types ranging from ETO to MTS, plan their production with the CyberPlan solution.

The success of the APS solution made in Cybertec is due to the fact that it meets all the requirements that a solution of this type must have, to which it adds others. In fact, CyberPlan offers the advantages of the cloud: the possibility of accessing the software in a versatile and completely scalable way, even from a tablet. In addition, the calculations are carried out by highly evolved proprietary algorithms thanks to DB in RAM, which guarantees maximum speed. Another aspect that distinguishes CyberPlan from competitors is its graphical effectiveness, thanks to which users find the information they are looking for clearly and precisely, quickly. The goodness at the graphic level is also evidenced by the fact that planners can customise the software according to their needs and use features that enhance their capabilities, such as drag-and-drop or drill-down. Thanks to these functions, planners can transform the data available to them into information useful for making decisions. Finally, the CyberPlan solution integrates with any ERP system (for example, SAP, Microsoft, Sage, Infor, Oracle and Zucchetti) ensuring stable and lasting integration without requiring excessive time and allowing you to eliminate numerous and redundant tools such as Excel and Project as well as to centralize the data in the management software.

 

Find out why CyberPlan wins software selections from top manufacturing companies

Discover CyberPlan and all its features, which allow the software for programming and scheduling production to be selected by the best manufacturing companies around the world. Contact us

 

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