Taylor Scheduler
The Problem. . .
In many manufacturing plants, once the ERP plan for the week or month has been generated, it's up to the department managers and supervisors to decide how to implement that plan. Schedulers develop a production sequence based on orders in the queue and orders they hope will be coming. As production continues and time passes, schedulers make new decisions based on information that continually changes. The activities of one department are coordinated with those of the others by daily production meetings and the efforts of expeditors who shepherd critical orders though the plant.
Compromises are often made as the number of orders and constraints in the production environment increases. As this manual scheduling process evolves, production efficiency is lost and, as a result, production costs increase.
Our Solution. . .
There is a better way. Taylor Scheduler enables you to proactively schedule detailed production activities across the whole plant and to anticipate resource conflicts, shortages and other problems before they happen. Because Taylor Scheduler is built on a model using the actual capacity, constraints and processes of your production operation, it ensures that you won't find yourself unable to meet delivery commitments.
Taylor Scheduler is a highly intuitive, real-time scheduling system that graphically represents your production schedule and allows you to communicate it to everyone involved. You define all of the variables that affect each step of the production process: interdependencies, sequence requirements and alternatives. The system is designed to be highly interactive while automating complex scheduling functions.
At the heart of Taylor Scheduler is a heuristics-based engine that systematically evaluates and selects scheduling alternatives based on the business rules you've defined. You also have the option of using a powerful algorithm-based optimizer that uses a multi-pass optimization strategy to determine the best sequence of orders at each work center.
Taylor Scheduler has been designed to interoperate with an existing ERP system. The ERP production plan serves as the initial input for your Taylor scheduling model. Likewise, the executable plan generated by the Taylor Scheduler can be fed back to ERP—synchronizing planning and scheduling and ensuring that purchase orders are linked to actual production orders. When you use Taylor Production Clients, Taylor Scheduler is linked to the shop floor to send dispatch lists to operators and to receive real-time status information back to the Taylor Scheduler.
Key components of Taylor Scheduler include the following features:
- Drag-and-drop scheduling allows you to change the sequence and priority of orders by moving schedule blocks on the system's graphical Gantt chart. You can make the changes you need and see the impact immediately.
- Extremely flexible model-building function that lets you precisely and completely model the way your plant operates. By starting with an accurate model of your production facility, you greatly improve the quality of the schedule you produce.
- Setup matrices allow you to effectively schedule setups in which duration depends on product sequences, attributes (e.g. color or material) and external variables (e.g., temperature).
- A powerful modeling language that enables you to define setup and run time equations that must be calculated dynamically.