Robust production planning tool for manufacturing

Demand Solutions Advanced Planning & Scheduling is a powerful and easy-to-use production scheduling solution that quickly produces accurate schedules taking into account machines, personnel, tooling and inventory constraints. The Demand Solutions Advanced Planning & Scheduling software enables manufacturers to balance material, capacity and shop floor schedules simultaneously to meet customer demand “on-time” at the lowest costs.

Business Benefits with Advanced Planning & Scheduling:

• Gain a full 360 degree view of your company’s planning and production status
• Grow revenue with shorter lead times and reliable promise dates that allow for more on-time deliveries and better customer service
• Cut costs by significantly reducing inventories, overtime, expediting and time spent updating spreadsheets
• Create accurate, real-time production schedules that your whole company can rely on
• Make informed decisions with full understanding of their impact
• Accurately predict the resources needed for each job and when the job will be completed
• Adjust and respond to changes quickly and easily with real-time tracking and performance indicators
• Plan across multiple facilities, managing critical manufacturing constraints

A Flexible Solution: Easy Data Migration

Demand Solutions Advanced Planning & Scheduling is flexible to meet the needs of your organization. The intuitive, easy-to-use user interface and robust functionality built on the Microsoft .Net architecture allows companies to quickly deploy and begin gaining value. This rough cut capacity planning solution is fully integrated with other Demand Solutions planning tools such as Forecast Management and Requirements Planning, or it can be used as a stand-alone solution using data from any ERP system, existing spreadsheets or database.

When combined with Demand Solutions Forecast Management and Requirements Planning products, Advanced Planning & Scheduling utilizes planned orders from Requirements Planning to simultaneously plan material and capacity to support customer requirements while minimizing the impact on manufacturing resources such as tools, machines and workforce.

This efficient production scheduling software identifies mismatches (shortages and overages) between supply and demand — even those that are months away. Such visibility provides organizations ample time to adjust purchasing plans and manufacturing capacities.

Top Features: Robust functionality at an affordable price

Visual Scheduling

• Manage all your constraints while the schedule takes materials, machines, labor, and tooling into account
• Customize charts to visually depict schedules with powerful Resource Gantt and Job Gantt features
• Move orders around easily while always respecting constraints and automatically rescheduling other jobs with Advanced Planning & Scheduling’s exclusive “finite” Drag-and-Drop feature
• Visualize resource utilization and availability with Gantt Charts and Capacity Plan graphs and grid
• See problems in advance with a red highlighting feature that identifies bottleneck operations

Powerful Optimization Engine

• Drive efficient production every minute of every day with optimization rules that allow you to schedule based on your goals and production requirements
• Balance between any combination of: due dates, priority, revenue, WIP reduction, setup time reduction, work remaining and many more options with easy slider-adjustable, resource-specific rules
• Minimize Work-In-Progress inventory and maximize output with JIT (Just in Time) and Theory of Constraints bottleneck scheduling

Multi-User and Multi-Plant Collaboration

• Work collaboratively and cohesively with any number of planners at the same time
• Manage schedules simultaneously — allowing each planner to focus on the operations that they know best
• Schedule on your own terms — by work center, department, facility, product line or customer.

What-If Impact Analysis

• Predict outcomes quickly and make informed decisions based on real and experimental schedules
• Graph and track schedule quality by using Key Performance Indicators
• Create multiple scenarios for comparing the main schedule against experimental schedules
• Undo/Redo user actions for safe evaluation of alternatives

Real-Time Schedules

• View the most up-to-date schedule at all times as the system enables real-time updates
• Use printed schedules or live dispatch lists directly from your system on the shop floor
• Schedule simple, single-operation jobs all the way up to many-to-many operation flows easily and accurately

Sales & Operations Planning

• See inventory projections that take the following variables into account: On-Hand Inventory, Sales Orders, Forecasts, Transfer Orders, Purchase Orders and Production Orders
• Avoid lost sales by easily identifying potential inventory backlogs that the system highlights in red
• Predict when materials will run out in time to order replenishments
• Identify the impact of capacity shortages on Forecasts and Sales Orders

Reliable, Accurate and Easy-to-Use

With Demand Solutions Advanced Planning & Scheduling, organizations can increase revenue and optimize resources with one integrated solution for rough cut capacity planning. This production scheduling solution is perfect for manufacturers — it is affordable, easy-to-use and yields fast return on investment.