ERP SYSTEMS (Planning & Scheduling)

The planning tool provides a long-range view of supply and demand for all products across all sections of the business. It works well with either a make to order business, where stock at each inventory point is seen as “owned” by a customer order, or in a make to stock/sell from stock business where stock at the various inventory points is pooled. It also works extremely well in a mixed stock service/make to order environment and can provide great detail and information on what is occurring in your business.

Demand is organised into weekly buckets, and online inquiry screens provide information on each product's supply points, demand areas and stock levels over the range of the planning window. All reporting is exception based and there are a great number of flags and factors that can be used to isolate issues in the enterprise.

Rough-cut capacity information is used in determining possible production requirements and smoothing of suggested production to meet demand is performed to avoid factory overloading.

The scheduling tool provides a short-term view of production in the factory and is used to create the actual production schedules based on the results of the planning system. The scheduling tool performs checks on capacity, pre-requisite jobs, availability of raw materials and allows the scheduling of both actual production orders and “expected” production based on the results of planning and unreleased production.

The scheduling tool works at the minute level and allows the scheduling of machine downtimes, boil outs (for dyeing) and machine setup times. It handles batch machines and continuous machines, allows production to be scheduled into overtime, or to be paused across non-working periods and includes conflict reporting mechanisms to allow the schedulers to easily locate problems in the schedule.

The scheduling tool can be used on systems other than the Arel Textile Management System if the appropriate data can be imported or exported.