TIPS & BEST PRACTICES

What are the most important factors to achieving Advanced Planning & Scheduling success? Demand Solutions shares their tips & best practices.

Begin with the business benefits in mind Take the time up-front to analyze your critical business issues that you want to improve with APS before you start implementing. To measure the success of the APS tool at your company it's important to go into it with a clear list of objectives such as: reduce the daily time spent scheduling from 8 hours to 2 hours or improve on-time delivery to 95% by next June, or cut WIP levels to 50%. These clear goals will help guide your decisions during the system rollout and help you measure your success.

Know your detailed needs before you go shopping Identify your critical resource constraints before you start shopping for a solution and make sure the system you choose can handle them. You'll want to know things such as: the volume of production orders you'll be scheduling, the special constraints that the system needs to take into account, the number of planners that need to be able to work simultaneously in the system, the number of plants that will be scheduled, and any technology requirements that are important for fitting in with your existing systems and internal expertise.

Choose the right person for the job The employee(s) you choose to be your planners will have a big impact on the success of the project. The best candidate will: be open-minded and hungry for business improvement, work comfortably with computers programs like Excel, and understand your production process and what makes a "good plan".

Forget old plans Don't spend a lot of time trying to make your APS create a schedule that "matches" your manual schedules. Of course, the important constraints have to be followed but remember that the goal of APS is not to duplicate what you were doing before but to do better. Focus on what makes a great schedule and setting up the system to get you there.

Start Vanilla When you start setting up the system keep track of "special cases" that come up but don't try to tackle every detail from the beginning. Instead, work on getting the basics into the system then start refining scheduling rules with any needed customizations. This will keep you on track and ensure that the overall system setup is accurate. If you customize too early the project will slow down and big changes later may undermine your customizations or even make them unnecessary.

No worries, you can do it Though Advanced Planning & Scheduling starts with "Advanced", it's the very fact that the software is advanced that makes your job easier. A good APS will be MUCH easier to maintain than your old spreadsheets: it's more visual and therefore easier to understand, it's integrated and therefore handles schedule changes on its own, and it's rule-based meaning it will do most of the scheduling for you and help you pinpoint any trouble. Once you're up on your new system, plan on spending a lot les s time maintaining schedules.