INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Software for Business
How software can make your
business scheduling more efficient
Specialist software can have an enormous impact on the
profitability of your businesses by improving the efficiency of
your scheduling operation. To increase responsiveness to your
customers if is worth considering moving away from spreadsheets
and towards advanced scheduling tools. Here Roch Gauthier,
Senior Director, Product Management, AspenTech. Writes about
the importance of plant scheduling.
P
roduction scheduling is one of the
most important disciplines within
process manufacturing. Crucially,
the scheduler is the linchpin to
customer satisfaction and operational
efficiency. Daily decisions made in
this vital function influence outcomes,
including what to make and when,
which ultimately impacts customer
orders and bottom-line profitability. keep the operation running according
to plan and meet internal and
external commitments.
When industry leaders look to
gain every possible competitive
advantage in business, scheduling
is a key area that needs to be given
greater precedence. With every
corrective and timely adjustment
to the manufacturing schedule,
the scheduler delivers enormous
benefits, including high levels of
customer service and responsiveness,
fulfilling order commitment promises,
manufacturing cost savings and
optimised inventory management. Investment in the discipline and
empowering schedulers with specialist
cutting-edge software has shown to
reap an enormous uplift in production
efficiencies and overall profitability
whilst simultaneously driving
improvements in customer
service levels.
Frequently fluctuating production,
restrictions in material transport
and storage, unforeseen customer
demands, changes to plans and
complexity are just some of the daily,
around the clock challenges for plant
schedulers today.
The continual management of
constant change places tremendous
pressure on schedulers to ensure they
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With the increasing complexity in
today’s market, executives need to
view scheduling as a vital part of the
business decision-making process and
elevate its status within
the organisation.
What-if?
Many organisations experience late
shipments and production problems
due to poor scheduling. Detailed
schedules can be difficult to create and
update when using the wrong tools and
in many situations, problems occur at
the scheduling level due to an inability
to easily visualise the immediate cause-
and-effect consequences of schedule
changes and their longer term ripple
effects into the future.
Schedulers need to be able to react
quickly, consider multiple ‘what-if’
scenarios and adjust their production
schedules accordingly in order to
keep production aligned to the plan
and achieve customer and internal
stakeholder commitments.
Poor production scheduling can
result in huge losses. The majority of
schedulers use less powerful solutions,
such as Excel spreadsheets, which
may have been adequate in the
past, but struggle to meet the needs
of companies looking to distinguish
themselves in the marketplace by being
a responsive and reliable supplier to
their customers.
Typically, the scheduler spends many
unproductive hours creating an initial
weekly schedule and expending
additional time every day manually
modifying and adjusting the schedule
in response to actual production
and logistical events and changes
in demand. With limited time and
cumbersome tools, most schedulers’
goal is to develop a feasible near
term schedule.
Additionally, the inability to see the
whole production picture results in
ambiguity for setting an effective
operational strategy. A myopic view of
future events prevents the scheduler
from identifying medium to longer
term potential issues. However, an
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