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Waterloo Manufacturing Software Offers New TACTIC Brochure

Wellesley, MA

Waterloo Manufacturing Software announces the availability of its new eight-page advanced finite capacity planning and scheduling (APS) color brochure. The brochure features the TACTIC PC based APS system.  It discusses the need for manufacturers to effectively and simultaneously manage their limited capacity and limited material in today’s fiercely competitive worldwide marketplace.  The brochure asserts that people and teamwork are the keys to effective management.

To that end, the brochure describes TACTIC’s sophisticated what-if features.  These features help manufacturing teams quickly combine their insight and divergent points of view to quickly resolve order promising and on-time delivery problems caused by ever increasing customer changes, material problems, and shop floor problems, without resorting to high expediting costs or excessive buffer inventory.

In addition, the brochure shows TACTIC display graphs.  Management teams use the graphs to show important business metrics (e.g., profit, utilization, inventory, on-time-delivery, etc.).  For comparison purposes, they can display the results of two of more what-if ideas on the same graph.  This lets them quickly see the value of various what-if ideas on different areas of the business as they try to continuously balance the needs of the business with the needs of customers as ever-increasing problems and changes occur.

Editors notes

Competitive pressures are increasingly forcing manufacturing management teams to quote ever-shorter lead-times, to offer ever-changing options, and to ensure ever-higher levels of on-time delivery.  Furthermore, they’re being challenged to perform without excessive inventory, without increasing costs, and without what later turns out to be too much of the wrong capacity.  The potential adverse effects are particularly acute for the component and subassembly portion of the original equipment manufacturing supply chain.  For these businesses, constant changes make cost-effectively balancing competitive lead-times against the efficient use of limited resources both crucial and difficult.

In the current era, management teams are increasingly turning to the TACTIC advanced finite capacity planning and scheduling system for help.  TACTIC explicitly and simultaneously considers their limited capacity and limited material as they promise delivery, plan production, plan material, plan capacity, and deal with changes and problems.  TACTIC projects the realistic effect on delivery, utilization, and inventory of new orders, order changes, material problems, production problems, vendor problems and business changes.

TACTIC possesses sophisticated what-if features.  These features let management teams quickly combine formal data (e.g., orders, routings, inventory, bills-of-material, and capacity limits) and intuition (i.e., what-if ideas).  TACTIC allows them to select the best what-if ideas to continuously balance what’s good for business with what’s good for customers, as they encounter changes and problems with increasingly complex tradeoffs.  TACTIC’s what-if features often provide significant visibility and flexibility improvements over reports, staff meetings, wallboards, and spreadsheets commonly used to project, simulate, and fix ever-increasing problems.

Management teams can use TACTIC standalone for planning, order promising, scheduling, and capacity management.  TACTIC can also be easily integrated with business systems.  TACTIC enables teams to better use their valuable business system data to overcome the finite capacity planning and scheduling limitations inherent in business systems.  Many teams have found that adding TACTIC saved them the cost, time, and disruption of replacing their business system to improve competitiveness.  In many cases, it helped them boost the return from their business system investment as well.  They used their business system data, TACTIC’s sophisticated what-if features, and the improved visibility and flexibility provided by TACTIC to simultaneously increase revenues, lower costs, and tie up less capital.

Waterloo Manufacturing Software develops and markets TACTIC to manufacturers worldwide.  TACTIC and associated support services are offered to U.S. manufacturing companies from offices located in Boston, Cleveland and Los Angeles.  TACTIC is offered to other manufacturers through a network of distributors.

More information

If you have questions or need more information, feel free to e-mail Charles Murgiano at cjmurgiano@waterloo-software.com or call 216-382-2541.

   

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