Resources

Are you always planning in firefighting mode? How long does it take for you to update the production or inventory plan? Are you able to truly focus on your plaanning KPIs?

Here are some tips that will help you determine where you stand and how to bring your planning process to the next level.

How broken is your planning process? Take the game to assess your current situtation.

Check the box(es) if this is something you would say — or said in the past few hours.

When you implement a tool like frePPLe in your company, there are various aspects you need to take into account: budget, timeline, requirements, features, integration with your current system, and learning curve. Here is the detailed timeline of a typical project with frePPLe.

Have you noticed that, for some products, you just never seem to reach your forecast accuracy objectives? Have you had to relentlessly explain to your management that you can’t do better?

Let us make your day: it’s not your fault. It really isn’t. Here, the metric is to blame.

A lot of planning processes start out with a spreadsheet: it provides an easy, intuitive and flexible way to structure your data. Times goes on, your planning process grows, and soon enough you end up with an Excel that hurts to look at. 

Forward scheduling starts a new task on a workstation as soon as the previous one is finished. Backward scheduling works from the due date of the demands and plans for a just-in-time completion of the order. It is widely recognized that the backward scheduling approach results in a superior plan. And yet, a lot of companies fail to plan in this way…

The terms planning and scheduling are often used interchangeably, but they actually refer to very distinct business processes. The planning process creates a midterm tactical plan, with the purpose of organizing material and capacity timely for the upcoming demand. The scheduling process creates a detailed short term execution plan for individual machines, operators, and materials, taking all constraints into account.

Many ERP systems claim to have integrated planning capabilities. More often than not, they provide only the most basic functionalities, which don't meet the needs of your planners. Result: Your production planners run their process in Excel spreadsheets. Sounds familiar?

Any supply chain or manufacturing process needs decoupling points where inventory is kept. At the decoupling points, you need to make important decisions on how much inventory to carry.