Manufacturing is caught between seemingly incompatible goals: flexibility and efficiency. Getting the balance wrong can lead to missed due dates, higher inventory and freight costs, and unplanned overtime to claw back capacity. Filling a functional gap between high-level planning tools, and shop floor tracking systems, Rob-Ex Scheduler gives you back control of your capacity, and helps you react to changing customer demand.
What you DO know about your plant CAN help you…!
Effective scheduling is driven by simple steps: define the the throughput of your assets; lay out the rules regarding product routes; make sure dependencies between production operations and supporting resources are considered; and be mindful of material availability. But in operations that face increasing demands to be leaner and more flexible, it’s harder for scheduling personnel to manage this without help.
Rob-Ex provides the environment to model all of these factors, and more. With core rules and configurations defined, Rob-Ex is able to apply a mix of scheduling strategies that reflect your priorities – whether that’s maximising asset utilisation, or meeting just-in-time deliveries. A mix of drag-and-drop GANTT style displays and more advanced calculation modes will let your planners quickly evaluate different scenarios, and commit to the best one.
Making Promises You Can Keep
This webinar provides an overview of how Rob-Ex fits with your overall systems landscape, and how it helps you balance customer commitments with efficiency and cost.
Value From Integration
Manufacturers getting the most value from production scheduling systems use them alongside their ERP and their plant data collection (or manufacturing execution) systems. With the ERP providing demand information and a roughly defined plan, Rob-Ex can then create the detailed schedules that make optimal use of assets and personnel. Kept up to date with live production data and order status information from plant systems, Rob-Ex lets you adapt your short term schedule to work around disruptions, or adapt to customer needs with options that reflect the currently committed assets and other resources.
Core Functionality
- Accurately model your plant’s capacity
- Define materials and routes that reflect asset constraints and operational dependencies, including the impact of setup and changeover activities
- Deploy a range of well-known scheduling strategies (forward, backward, bottleneck resolution)
- Integrate with ERP or Inventory systems to enable scheduling that reflects material availability
- Provide by-department or by-unit schedules to improve coordination of make-ready work and material staging
- Use feedback from shop floor data collection or MES systems to keep schedules and predicted completion times current
- Reflect external operational/contractor capacities in your plans