Can
you respond?. 
Much scheduling is done on wall charts or T card boards. Both of these are fairly static ways of holding a schedule. But real life is dynamic: priorities change, machines breakdown, staff go off sick. Each of these blows a hole in the plan which needs to be fixed. So we now need a flexible way of maintaining our plans. To gain flexiblilty some people use magnetic boards and T-card boards. But with these it is difficult to be clear that the plan is workable or will deliver to the customers on time.
An electronic planning board enables to you to move jobs around to fit the circumstances, and checks that the plan is achievable. The electronic board can ensure that quite complex rules are adherred to, like varying set up times dependent on the product sequence. Manually checking these rules while under pressure to deliver leads to errors, but Preactor can calculate the right times and sequences according to the rules of your business very quickly.
Furthermore, the static planning board is in
one place, whereas the electronic information can be distributed to
wherever it is needed. The workforce can see what the next job is
even if it was changed just 2 minutes ago. The Sales Office can
see that work has actually started on their customer's job.
All this leads to more accurate plans that are up to date to give better customer service, while giving the planner the chance to do his job without undue pressure. After all there are plenty of pressures on your business without generating them inside the company
The Pressure is ON to Compete
- Global competition from India, China, Thailand, Malaysia and former Eastern Block countries is forcing companies to re-assess their position in the market
- There is pressure to compete on agility, quick turn round and on-time delivery
- And to reduce costs and lower inventory levels
- These pressures lead to smaller batch sizes - 'sequencing' becomes increasingly important
- And then to synchronize variable demand with Materials flow & Capacity