Waterloo Production Scheduling Blog

You want to schedule your production better. You think production scheduling software can help. But in today’s environment of tight budgets, how can you put together a proposal to management for scheduling software that makes sense?

At a minimum, any proposal to buy production scheduling software needs to pay for itself, and ideally provide a significant return to your company. Will simply automating what you are doing now get you the kind of returns you need? Should you rather try and think outside of the box, and try and harness the power of advanced production scheduling software to make leaps forward in how you run your business?

The production scheduling process controls how your company allocates resources (capital, labor, purchased material) to meet customer needs. In manufacturing environment, it is a primary mechanism by which you build product, and commit costs. With this said, production scheduling means many different things to different people. Some companies take a longer range views. In other environments, the production scheduling process has a decidedly short range focus. In these situations, production schedulers concern themselves with what is going to run this shift, this day, and, sometimes, this week.

Short term scheduling is important. Poor decisions on how work is sequenced can hurt efficiency and lead to unhappy customers. The process can be time consuming and error prone. But in most environments, you can solve the problem by throwing people at it. We’ve seen companies divide up their operations among multiple schedulers. Armed with tools such as ERP system shop floor control modules, Excel spreadsheets, or pads and paper, the job can usually get done, albeit not without significant costs in manpower and aggravation.

Advanced production scheduling software can streamline the short term scheduling process. It can reduce scheduling manpower, it can prevent jobs from being “lost”, it can help eliminate poor sequencing decisions, it can improve your shop floor’s efficiency, and it can improve customer delivery. These benefits can be significant, and are usually enough to more than justify the purchase of advanced production scheduling software. However, by not expanding your time horizons, both figuratively and literally, you are leaving money on the table.

Think about the planning and scheduling related decisions your company makes outside of the short term. Examples of these kinds of decisions might be:

1. What lead times and delivery dates should we quote to our customers?
2. What should our work hours be (e.g. should we add or subtract shifts, should we work overtime)?
3. How should we be working in prototype work, or scheduling preventative maintenance?
4. Should we be hiring or reducing staff?
5. What should our target inventory levels be?
6. Should we be pulling production forward, or pushing it back, to level forecasted loads?
7. Should we be outsourcing production, or bringing production back in house?
8. Should we be maintaining our existing production processes, or should we be investing in new manufacturing processes and procedures?
9. Should we be investing capital in new production equipment or even in new plants?

Clearly the short term decisions you make on a day by day basis are important. However, longer term decisions like the ones listed above involve the commitment of more cost on the part of your company. They also typically have a bigger impact on your company’s profitability and, if you get them wrong, even survivability.

So, how can you make sure that your company is making the best possible decisions in the medium to long term? Wouldn’t it be great if you could peer into the future and see the impact of various decisions before you make them? Ideally, you should be able to get this visibility using the same production scheduling approach both for short term scheduling and for longer term decision making. All you should need to do is extend the horizon. However, if you are an operation of any size, this is easier said than done using manual methods. Short term you can usually schedule manually with people and elbow grease. As you extend the planning and scheduling horizon, though, there are just too many variables involved and too many calculations needed.

Advanced production scheduling software can consider the numerous variables involved, harness the computational power of computers, and give you the visibility you need to make better decisions. It considers the finite or limited capacity or your organization. It considers your work load, selling prices and costs. As advanced production scheduling software loads work on your limited capacity, it shows you when work will finish relative to its due date, when revenue will be booked, and when costs will be incurred.

Think outside the box! Advanced production scheduling software can do much more than schedule in the short term. It can give you the visibility to make better decisions throughout the planning and scheduling horizon, dramatically lowering costs, increasing customer service, and improving profitability.

In the immediately preceding post, we discussed how the fit between your operations and production environment and advanced planning and scheduling / production scheduling software is paramount. However, partnering with a vendor that can help you fully unlock the potential of the software is also important.

In the previous post, we started on a list of questions to help you determine how well vendors might meet your needs. The list of questions is continued below:

3. Has the vendor helped you develop an installation / implementation plan? If so, does it make sense?

Your implementation plan should be based on what you want to accomplish with the software, and what resources you have to bring to bear. It should not be “boilerplate” or one size fits all. Your vendor should be set up to provide you as little or as much consulting assistance as you need. The amount of assistance needed will, of course, be based on how you plan to apply the software.

The amount of assistance should also be based on the expertise and availability of in house staff, and your implementation time table. If you have much in the way of available in house staff, and time is not of the essence, the implementation plan should allow you to assume more responsibility, keeping your costs low. If you need resources and you have an aggressive implementation time table, you will need a plan that calls upon your vendor to step in and assume more of the implementation load.

Be particularly wary of implementations done by vendor partners or resellers. While the developers are always compensated from software revenue, often the bulk of partner or reseller revenue comes from services. Therefore, there may be a strong incentive for them to sell you services that you may not need.

4. Who within your vendor’s organization is responsible for software bug fixes and enhancements, and what is your vendor’s release schedule?

There is no standardize agreement on the functions and features that advanced planning and scheduling software and production scheduling software should contain. Also, manufacturing environments vary widely, as do the ways in which users want to apply the software. Given these market characteristics, it is common for you to identify enhancements that will help you get increased value from your planning and scheduling software.

Some of enhancements you might identify prior to the sale, but others won’t become obvious until after you work with the software for a while. Therefore, your vendor’s policies relative to new versions and upgrades might be very important to you. You should understand the following:

• Who in your vendor’s organization is responsible for development, where are they located, and how responsive are they to requests from your implementation staff? Many vendors are resellers for other companies. Sometimes communication and responsiveness between divisions of the same company can be lacking, let alone between different companies. Also, your needs may be overlooked in the face of differing goals on the part of resellers and developers. Finally, some software development teams are located overseas. Coordination can lag given time zone and cultural differences. You best bet is to look for a vendor with a development group tightly integrated with implementation staff.
• What is the vendor’s release schedule? If your vendor just made a yearly release last week, and today you identified an enhancement that is extremely important to you, you could be at best severely inconvenienced. You should look for vendors with short duration or flexible release schedules so that you have a better chance of having your enhancement and bug fix needs met in a timely manner.
• How likely is it that you will be charged for enhancements? It is within the right of every vendor to charge for enhancements requested by customers that will require major amounts of costly work with limited general market appeal. Enhancements like these aside, vendors can take different strategies toward enhancements. Some view development as a profit center, and view client enhancement requests as an opportunity to raise revenue. Other vendors view development as a cost center. They try their best to offer enhancements under the terms of existing software maintenance agreements, and view enhancement requests as a way to improve the customer experience while adding to the long term attractiveness of the product.
5. What are your vendors references like?

Checking your vendor’s references is so important that we’ve devoted an entire additional blog post to the topic. In summary you should:

• Delay checking references until the end of the evaluation process. At this point, you will have a better idea of the questions you’d like to ask references. Ideally, these are the type questions that are impractical for the vendor to address as part of the regular sales process.
• Share your questions with your vendor sales staff. He or she can then try to match you up with references to answer specific questions.
• Be open-minded relative to the references that you speak with. Of course it would be ideal to speak with a reference “just like you”. This might not be practical given the different ways companies even in the same industry apply scheduling software. Rather judge references based more on how well they answer your questions than surface level similarities.

While choosing the right advanced planning and scheduling / production scheduling software is important, so is picking the right vendor. Given the potential complexity of scheduling software, deciding on the right vendor to partner with can have a big impact on your success. Choose wisely!

The benefits of advanced planning and scheduling and production scheduling software can be immense. However, production scheduling software is not a commodity. There is no guarantee that any advanced planning and scheduling software you chose is going to deliver all the benefits that you are hoping for. In other posts, we talk about how to pick the best production scheduling software for your company. Your evaluation needs to start with the advanced planning and scheduling / production scheduling software itself, and how well it fits in your environment.

As we’ve advocated elsewhere in this blog, we feel it is important that your vendor work with you to develop a sample scheduling model that shows how the software would map onto your real world situation. It is the only way to know for sure that you have a fit. Let’s say you’ve taken this step. Also let’s say that you have worked with more than one vendor to map advanced planning and scheduling / production scheduling software onto you environment. What if the software looks very similar to you? How do you choose?

Your next step should be to concentrate on the vendor. You need to pick the vendor that will be your best partner to help you unlock the full potential of advanced planning and scheduling software. The questions below might help in this process:

1. In the process of building the sample production scheduling model, how well have you and the vendor worked together?

   How well you work with vendor staff members prior to the sale is a strong indicator of what it will be like to work with them after the sale. This is particularly true if the same staff will be working with you pre and post sales. You might want to ask yourself the following questions:

   • Does the vendor put your needs first? Is he or she curious about fully understanding your needs and goals, or does he or she fixate on functions and features, a good many of which won’t even be relevant to you?
   • Does the vendor seem knowledge about production and operations environments or is he or she a “software geek”? Deep production experience is important in properly applying planning and scheduling software. The more real world experience the vendor has the better.
   • Does the vendor seem reliable, or do your phone calls and emails go unanswered for long periods of time? If a vendor isn’t responsive before the sale is made, they will only be worse after
2. How much continuity will there be between vendor pre-sales and post-sales staff?

   You may really like your vendor’s sales and pre-sales consulting staff, but there are no guarantees that you will get to work with them after the sale. While maintaining the same staff pre and post sales is clearly in the best interests of the customer, most software companies have their most senior staff work only with prospective customers. In their minds, more is at stake. After the sale, they turn consulting and implementation tasks over to more junior employees. Unfortunately, you as the customer will often then have to devote time (and money) to bringing the new vendor staff up to speed on your application (usually while paying their consulting rate). You also may find that promises made by sales staff are “forgotten” when new implementation staff take over.

   If you suspect there is going to be such a hand off, you might want to ask the following questions:

   • What are the backgrounds of implementation staff members?
   • What is the sales team going to do to educate the implementation staff on my account?
   • Who is going to be my point of contact? What level of access might I still have to pre-sales staff?
   • How do we resolve potential discrepancies between the positions taken by vendor pre and post sales staff?

Look for additional questions for vendors in our next post.

Your company is interested in purchasing production scheduling or advanced planning and scheduling software. You’ve already contacted and, to some extent, worked with vendors. You know you need to check two references. What should your strategy be, and how should you go about it? Is there really something that you can learn from references, or should your goal be to
simply “check off a box” to satisfy your management?

There are two things to keep in mind. First, vendors are going to do everything in their power to screen out negative references and only give out positive ones. Therefore, any reputable vendor who has been in business for more than a couple of years is going to be able to give you references that will say good things. Second, when a reference takes time out of his or her busy day to share experiences, the reference is doing both you, and the vendor a favor. Since vendors won’t want to impose upon and unduly burden their best customers, they are going to limit the number of references you speak with. Furthermore, if you are as busy as most people who work in production environments, you are not going to have time to talk to numerous references.

So, in practical terms, you are going to have limited chances to talk to references. How do you make the most of these opportunities? One strategy is to ask for references early in the process, and use the references to screen vendors. If you do so, you’ll be squandering an opportunity. At this point in the process, you might not know what the most important issues will be for your intended use of the software. In addition, it will be hard to screen vendors based on references that are going to be hand-picked to be positive.

A far better strategy is to hold off contacting references until near the end of your evaluation. Evaluating complex software such as advanced planning and scheduling can be an involved process. Don’t try to make a choice immediately. Share with your vendor your goals for the software, how your operations are structured, who will be using the software, and the data that you have available. Educate the vendor so that, in turn, they can educate you on how their production scheduling software might apply in your environment. How well a vendor works with you prior to the sale is a good indicator of what it will be like after you’ve paid the vendor’s invoice. As advocated elsewhere in this blog, working with your vendor on a sample production scheduling model prior to the sale can be invaluable in determining if the software, and the vendor, will meet your needs.

While the process of working with a vendor prior to the sale can be invaluable, it won’t answer all of your questions. In fact the process most likely will produce questions that hadn’t occurred to you earlier. Many of the questions will be fairly general, but more than a few will be specific to how you plan to apply the advanced planning and scheduling software to your environment.

Share your questions with your vendor’s sales staff! If your vendor understands your questions, they can take steps to get you answers. A smart vendor will listen to your questions, and match you up with references who have dealt with the same issues that you are raising.

While it would be ideal for your vendor to match you up with a reference “just like you”, it pays to look beyond the superficial. Companies in similar industries often go about satisfying their customers in very different ways. Also, just because two a companies are in the same industry doesn’t mean that they necessarily have the same goals for the production scheduling software. One might want software for scheduling over a short horizon, while the other may want to do longer range planning. While the references your vendor introduces to you may be in a different industry, below the surface you may have much in common.

What kind of questions might you want to ask production scheduling and advanced planning and scheduling references? Below is a list of less obvious questions that might be helpful:

• How well did the production scheduling / advanced planning and scheduling software meet your expectations?
• How well has the vendor kept promises made to you before you purchased?
• How smooth was the handoff between the vendor’s sales staff and implementation staff?
• How responsive have the vendor’s support and development staffs been to issues which have arisen and to enhancement requests?
• How expert in the software are the vendor’s consulting and implementation staff, and how quickly have this staff picked up the nuances of your business?
• How did you make use of the vendor’s staff during your implementation?
• Did the vendor help you draft an implementation plan, and if so, how useful was it?
• How smooth and problem free was your implementation?
• What kind of unplanned expenses and costs were passed on to you?
• What business benefits did the production scheduling / advanced planning and scheduling software help you achieve, and how quickly did you get those benefits?

You’re thinking about implementing a production scheduling, production planning, or Advanced Planning and Scheduling software. You know these systems need the right kind of data to be successful. Do you have the data you need? If not, how do you go about getting it? Once you have the data, what is the best way to store, maintain, and access it?

Advanced Planning and Scheduling systems have a reputation for requiring excessive data. Whether or not this is true depends upon the capabilities of your scheduling system, and your goals for it. Ideally, you will have picked a vendor with deep experience helping customers be successful in a wide range of different industries. This experience should have bred a sensible approach to scheduling embodied in a practical production scheduling software product.

As is generally the case with most real world problems, the most workable approach to scheduling is to “start simple” and to build on success. With respect to data, this approach involves starting initially with minimal amounts of data, and augmenting and refining the data over time. The “start simple and build strategy” makes particular sense for data since it costs money (time, effort) to collect and maintain data, and you only want to access data that is truly useful. To support this strategy, initially your production scheduling software should be able to generate decent schedules with minimal data. However, the software should also give you the capability to add and refine data over time, and to see corresponding increases in schedule accuracy.

What data do you need to start with?

1. Primary resources to schedule – can be machines, tooling, people or material.
2. When the resources are available – i.e. their calendars and shifts.
3. Routings – the steps or operations orders go through in their production. For each step, the duration each resource is required.
4. Requirements to schedule – often called orders. Typically, an order has a quantity and a due date.
5. Priority – some “rule” which determines the sequence in which orders and / or operations are scheduled. For example, one simple priority rule is earliest due date.

What data should you be able to add over time? The software should be able to handle all of the data required to model both your operation and the way you want to schedule that operation. Different industries can have unique data needs. Below are a half a dozen examples of different types of data:

• Additional resources which are required along with the primary resource to perform an operation. Examples might be labor, tooling and material in combination with a primary machine.
• Groups of alternate resources that are able to perform an operation.
• Complex relationships between operations in a routing. For example, sequential, overlap, parallel as well as complex networks of operations.
• Characteristics by which operations should be grouped, sequenced, and scheduled back to back on a resource to reduce set up time. Also, the associated time penalty that occurs when changes in characteristics occur.
• Characteristics of operations that can be grouped together for batch processing, for instance in ovens. Also, the associated oven capacity.
• Values that determine how an operation should be split over machines with similar capabilities.

Where can you obtain production scheduling related data? The first place to look is your business system (ERP system), or other company data bases. Systems such as these should provide the basic data needed to generate initial production schedules. Unfortunately, production scheduling is an afterthought in most ERP systems. Therefore, rarely are such systems designed to hold the more detailed data that might be required to refine your production schedules.

If you need detailed data, you are probably going to need to turn to the true experts – your shop floor staff and industrial engineering group. Often these staff members will hold the data you need in their heads, or in personal data bases (e.g. in Excel).

Once your data is identified, the next step is to get it into an easily acceptable electronic format. One option is to add this data to your business / ERP system or company data base in unused or user defined fields.

An alternative to adding scheduling related data to your ERP system or company data base is to add it directly to your production scheduling or Advanced Planning and Scheduling system. The scheduling system should be designed for easy data input. In addition, it should have features designed for easy maintenance and change of bills of material and routings, which is where most of the specialized scheduling related data resides.

How should you access the data? Some data is best held and maintained in company ERP and business systems, and other data is best held and maintained in the Advanced Planning and Scheduling software. Your scheduling software should contain interface tools for transferring data easily and efficiently between systems. In addition, the software should have rules for merging different data from different sources in a seamless manner (e.g. combining data resident in the scheduling system with data transferred from ERP).

So, how can you satisfy the data needs of your production planning and scheduling system? By starting with readily available data and collecting more complex, detailed data over time, by storing the data in the system that makes the most sense, and by using the data transfer and data merging capability of your Advanced Planning and Scheduling system to pull the data together for effective use.