The competition in manufacturing seldom heats up. It’s just always hot and getting hotter. The more efficiently you can run your shop floor and machines, the better you’re going to do. At the same time, if you let things slip, you may find yourself on the wrong end of the competitive race. In this context, advanced planning and scheduling can be an essential tool for achieving new heights of productivity and return on manufacturing assets.
Acumatica Cloud ERP for Manufacturing now has an expanded module for Advanced Planning and Scheduling. It enables you to schedule the shop floor on the basis of work center or machine capacity. In this process, it considers the availability of raw material inventories, dispatch priorities, shifts, work calendars and more. We have helped many manufacturing businesses improve their operations with this toolset.
Here are some highlights of the new edition:
- Finite Capacity Scheduling—Acumatica lets you maximize resource schedules, but do so without overloading your machines or work centers. You can employ tooling constraints to make sure that your production team has what it needs to get the work done in a timely manner.
- Rough Cut Capacity Planning (RCCP)—RCCP lets you establish that you have enough capacity to meet your master schedule’s requirements. With RCCP, you can set a priority for production orders with priority codes. This way, you will understand the production demands being made by your high-profile customers.
- Work Center Utilization—With Work Center Utilization, you gain the ability to compare a work center’s available hours with the actual hours that have been scheduled for it. The utilization reports then help you balance demand against your available capacity.
- Work Center Capacity Planning—This feature enables the system to plan by work center, monitoring and providing details regarding scheduled production orders. This way, it is possible to maximize the utilization of the work center and balance its load.
- Machine Scheduling—Users can create schedules that work down at the machine level. This way, operations that must run on a specific machine will not create bottlenecks in the overall shopfloor workflow. Scheduling can be based on a machine’s capability, speed and capacity.
- Tool Scheduling—Tooling creates its own constraints in many situations, such as when jigs, molds, dies and fixtures are in finite supply, while needed by multiple processes. With Tool Scheduling, plant managers can create an optimal usage schedule for tools.
- Material Constraints—Advanced Planning and Scheduling from Acumatica lets users schedule production with an eye toward materials. It takes into consideration what inventory that is available on-hand along with current production orders and open purchase orders. This ensures that production orders won’t be scheduled if there are not sufficient materials available to complete the work.
- Schedule Reports—Manufacturing managers can use work center and machine dispatch reports to get a clear view of scheduled production orders and operations that are currently scheduled. With these reports, they can identify resources that required to complete scheduled production orders.
To learn more about Advanced Planning and Scheduling from Acumatica, contact us for a demo and free consultation.
Additional Manufacturing Resources
Automated Data Capture for Manufacturers: Save Time and Reduce Errors
How MRP Can Work for Your Business
How Bill of Materials and Routing Software Can Work for You
Manufacturing Data Capture: Automating Shop Floor Data Entry
