The steps we recommend that you go through in implementing production scheduling / advanced planning and scheduling software are described in more detail below:

1. Review of Business Goals

The first step in any implementation should be a review of your measurable business goals for the project. The structuring of your scheduling model and the thrust of your implementation will be toward satisfying these goals. Simply stating “We want to schedule better” will not give you the focus you need to achieve quantifiable benefits. You should also develop a specific, detailed time line for reaching these goals.

2. Review of Prototype Scheduling Module

If your vendor has created a prototype scheduling module as part of your software evaluation, you’ll want your vendor consultant to help review the model relative to the business goals of your organization. You should note any gaps in the model’s ability to help you meet your goals, and put a plan in place to close those gaps.

3. Discussion of Other Applicable Software Features

Once you’ve reviewed the model, you may want your vendor consultant to discuss other software features that might help you achieve your goals. Most advanced production scheduling systems have a wide range of features designed for customers in diverse industries. A review of all of these features will be very time consuming, and not in your best interests. Trust your vendor consultant to use his or her expertise to concentrate on features that will help you reach your stated goals.

4. Develop a Data Plan

You need data to support the applicable features and functionality of your advanced production scheduling software. Without “clean”, current data, you can’t schedule effectively. You should put in place a plan to provide data to the software on both a one time and an ongoing basis. You will type at least some of this data directly into the software. Often you will transfer some of this data from other data bases or systems. Your vendor should be qualified to help you as much or as little as you require with data transfer tasks.

5. Debug Data

Invariably you will encounter errors and inaccuracies in the data input to and transferred to the production scheduling software. The APS software should have error checking routines that filter out data that is obviously wrong. However, no data scrubbing is perfect, and the software won’t catch all “dirty” data. Therefore, you should build “rough” schedules for initial review. You don’t have to make these schedules perfect, but they should allow you to verify data for accuracy. Based on what you learn, make necessary modifications to the data and to the interface.

6. Finalize Scheduling Approach

Once your scheduling model is loaded with real amounts of reasonably accurate data, it is time for you to finalize the scheduling approach you will use. Most advanced production scheduling software supports a wide range of different scheduling algorithms and approaches. The scheduling approach you choose will be highly dependent upon your goals for the project. You may want help from your vendor consultant. Ask the consultant to explain reasonable alternatives, and help you chose the approach that will work best for you.

Look for more implementation steps in the next post.

Advanced Production Scheduling software (APS) can help.  APS allows you to generate schedules short, medium and long term.  It gives visibility into when work will finish considering the limited capacity (machines, people, tooling, material, etc.) of your operation.  You can use the software’s what-if feature to evaluate scenarios that improve both delivery and efficiency, and that help you work around problems.

Specifically, improved production scheduling can help you wring more cost savings out of your operation by:

1. Improving trade-offs between set up efficiency and delivery
2. Minimizing overtime
3. Better controlling the shop floor
4. Efficiently working around problems
5. Cutting expediting
6. Reducing schedule generation times

Improving Trade-Offs Between Set Up Efficiency and Delivery

You can be responsive to your customers by continually breaking down set ups, but efficiency suffers.  Stay in a set up as long as you can and your efficiency improves, but you sacrifice customer service.  Advanced production scheduling software can help you optimize set ups in a way that both minimizes cost and maximizes delivery.

Minimizing Overtime

You know you are behind and delivery is suffering.  Under pressure to “catch up” quickly, you extend shifts and work Saturday.  Maybe you even schedule work on Sunday.  How do you know you are using expensive time and a half and double time hours in the best possible manner, and not just building costly inventory?

Advanced production scheduling software identifies the current and future bottlenecks in your operation that will contribute to late work.  Rather than reactively scheduling a lot of overtime “just in case”, APS pinpoints how to apply overtime in a cost effective manner where it is needed the most.

Better Controlling the Shop Floor

Without a schedule that your operation buys into, the shop floor can quickly get out of control.  Shop floor staff tend to work on jobs that run without problems rather than what is needed, and jobs will occasionally “get lost”.  Efficiency and delivery can suffer.  Advanced production scheduling software improves shop floor control by explicitly considering capacity and generating good schedules that are understandable and that all staff can believe in and follow.

Efficiently Working around Problems

While you work like crazy to eliminate variability, problems such customer changes, vendor problems, quality holds, broken equipment, and sick people will always occur.  Production scheduling software gives you visibility into how these problems impact your operation.  APS software also gives you the ability to generate and chose from different scenarios that get you out of trouble with the least possible cost.

Cutting Expediting

One solution to delivery problems is to devote staff to expediting hot orders.  Expediting is a non productive activity that adds nothing but cost.  You can eliminate expediting with a well controlled shop floor driven by a detailed production schedule that all staff follow,  Also, the visibility and problem solving capability afforded by advanced production scheduling can greatly reduce the instances when expediting is required.

Reducing Schedule Generation Times

Advanced production scheduling software can quickly generate base schedules and what-if scenarios that explicitly consider capacity and accurately predict order completions.  In comparison, other scheduling methods do not consider capacity nor predict finish dates and are manual and time consuming.  Using APS software can free planners, schedulers, and managers from the drudgery of schedule generation, and allow them to use freed up time on higher value add activities.

Your production scheduling system doesn’t need to handle material if you only want to schedule “short interval” work released by your ERP system for which you already have material in house. However, if you limit your planning and scheduling to such a short time horizon, you are leaving all kinds of money on the table. See the post Advanced Production Scheduling Software: Pay for It By Extending Your Decision Making Horizon for details.

Assuming you want to extend your scheduling horizon, why do you need your production scheduling software to handle material? Depending upon your situation, more than one of the following reasons could be relevant:

1. As you extend your time horizon, material can become a capacity constraint. Even in flat bill of material environments, incoming material needs to be purchased and may be in short supply. In deeper bill of material environments, higher level items depend upon the production of lower level items. ERP / MRP’s estimated, average lead times just aren’t good enough to give the predictive information that you need to make good management decisions.
2. In some flat bill of material environments, incoming material is a commodity, and is relatively available. However, in these kinds of environments, you may be tempted keep plenty of material on hand since you don’t know exactly when you’ll need it, increasing carrying costs. Production scheduling software that considers material as well as capacity can tell you exactly when you need incoming materials based on other capacity constraints (machines, tooling, labor). You can significantly cut inventory (and carrying costs) by synchronizing material purchases to your capacity constrained production schedule.
3. In material constrained, make to order environments, the ability to check material constraints as well as capacity constraints is essential to promising realistic customer delivery dates. In addition to considering all relevant capacity constraints, the production scheduling software also needs the capability to explode bills of material. Why not use your ERP / MRP system to explode bills, you might ask? Because ERP / MRP has no simulation capability. To get the bill to explode, you’ll need to first give the customer some guess at a delivery date and accept the order. You will then need to wait until the exploded orders make it to the production scheduling system before you can schedule them. The realistic date you’ll get out of your production scheduling software may be very different than the estimated date you gave the customer, and it may be too late to change the date.

   A much better strategy is to enter the customer order into the production scheduling system on a simulated basis, explode the bill netting available inventory, schedule created orders considering both capacity and material constraints, and come back to your customer with a highly accurate estimated completion date. Once the customer has accepted this accurate date, the order can then be entered into the ERP / MRP system.

To get the full benefit of production scheduling software, extend your time horizon and consider materials. This strategy can give you significant benefit in make to order and make to stock environments, whether material is constraining or is readily available.

At a minimum, any proposal to buy production scheduling software needs to pay for itself, and ideally provide a significant return to your company. Will simply automating what you are doing now get you the kind of returns you need? Should you rather try and think outside of the box, and try and harness the power of advanced production scheduling software to make leaps forward in how you run your business?

The production scheduling process controls how your company allocates resources (capital, labor, purchased material) to meet customer needs. In manufacturing environment, it is a primary mechanism by which you build product, and commit costs. With this said, production scheduling means many different things to different people. Some companies take a longer range views. In other environments, the production scheduling process has a decidedly short range focus. In these situations, production schedulers concern themselves with what is going to run this shift, this day, and, sometimes, this week.

Short term scheduling is important. Poor decisions on how work is sequenced can hurt efficiency and lead to unhappy customers. The process can be time consuming and error prone. But in most environments, you can solve the problem by throwing people at it. We’ve seen companies divide up their operations among multiple schedulers. Armed with tools such as ERP system shop floor control modules, Excel spreadsheets, or pads and paper, the job can usually get done, albeit not without significant costs in manpower and aggravation.

Advanced production scheduling software can streamline the short term scheduling process. It can reduce scheduling manpower, it can prevent jobs from being “lost”, it can help eliminate poor sequencing decisions, it can improve your shop floor’s efficiency, and it can improve customer delivery. These benefits can be significant, and are usually enough to more than justify the purchase of advanced production scheduling software. However, by not expanding your time horizons, both figuratively and literally, you are leaving money on the table.

Think about the planning and scheduling related decisions your company makes outside of the short term. Examples of these kinds of decisions might be:

1. What lead times and delivery dates should we quote to our customers?
2. What should our work hours be (e.g. should we add or subtract shifts, should we work overtime)?
3. How should we be working in prototype work, or scheduling preventative maintenance?
4. Should we be hiring or reducing staff?
5. What should our target inventory levels be?
6. Should we be pulling production forward, or pushing it back, to level forecasted loads?
7. Should we be outsourcing production, or bringing production back in house?
8. Should we be maintaining our existing production processes, or should we be investing in new manufacturing processes and procedures?
9. Should we be investing capital in new production equipment or even in new plants?

Clearly the short term decisions you make on a day by day basis are important. However, longer term decisions like the ones listed above involve the commitment of more cost on the part of your company. They also typically have a bigger impact on your company’s profitability and, if you get them wrong, even survivability.

So, how can you make sure that your company is making the best possible decisions in the medium to long term? Wouldn’t it be great if you could peer into the future and see the impact of various decisions before you make them? Ideally, you should be able to get this visibility using the same production scheduling approach both for short term scheduling and for longer term decision making. All you should need to do is extend the horizon. However, if you are an operation of any size, this is easier said than done using manual methods. Short term you can usually schedule manually with people and elbow grease. As you extend the planning and scheduling horizon, though, there are just too many variables involved and too many calculations needed.

Advanced production scheduling software can consider the numerous variables involved, harness the computational power of computers, and give you the visibility you need to make better decisions. It considers the finite or limited capacity or your organization. It considers your work load, selling prices and costs. As advanced production scheduling software loads work on your limited capacity, it shows you when work will finish relative to its due date, when revenue will be booked, and when costs will be incurred.

Think outside the box! Advanced production scheduling software can do much more than schedule in the short term. It can give you the visibility to make better decisions throughout the planning and scheduling horizon, dramatically lowering costs, increasing customer service, and improving profitability.

In the previous post, we started on a list of questions to help you determine how well vendors might meet your needs. The list of questions is continued below:

3. Has the vendor helped you develop an installation / implementation plan? If so, does it make sense?

Your implementation plan should be based on what you want to accomplish with the software, and what resources you have to bring to bear. It should not be “boilerplate” or one size fits all. Your vendor should be set up to provide you as little or as much consulting assistance as you need. The amount of assistance needed will, of course, be based on how you plan to apply the software.

The amount of assistance should also be based on the expertise and availability of in house staff, and your implementation time table. If you have much in the way of available in house staff, and time is not of the essence, the implementation plan should allow you to assume more responsibility, keeping your costs low. If you need resources and you have an aggressive implementation time table, you will need a plan that calls upon your vendor to step in and assume more of the implementation load.

Be particularly wary of implementations done by vendor partners or resellers. While the developers are always compensated from software revenue, often the bulk of partner or reseller revenue comes from services. Therefore, there may be a strong incentive for them to sell you services that you may not need.

4. Who within your vendor’s organization is responsible for software bug fixes and enhancements, and what is your vendor’s release schedule?

There is no standardize agreement on the functions and features that advanced planning and scheduling software and production scheduling software should contain. Also, manufacturing environments vary widely, as do the ways in which users want to apply the software. Given these market characteristics, it is common for you to identify enhancements that will help you get increased value from your planning and scheduling software.

Some of enhancements you might identify prior to the sale, but others won’t become obvious until after you work with the software for a while. Therefore, your vendor’s policies relative to new versions and upgrades might be very important to you. You should understand the following:

• Who in your vendor’s organization is responsible for development, where are they located, and how responsive are they to requests from your implementation staff? Many vendors are resellers for other companies. Sometimes communication and responsiveness between divisions of the same company can be lacking, let alone between different companies. Also, your needs may be overlooked in the face of differing goals on the part of resellers and developers. Finally, some software development teams are located overseas. Coordination can lag given time zone and cultural differences. You best bet is to look for a vendor with a development group tightly integrated with implementation staff.
• What is the vendor’s release schedule? If your vendor just made a yearly release last week, and today you identified an enhancement that is extremely important to you, you could be at best severely inconvenienced. You should look for vendors with short duration or flexible release schedules so that you have a better chance of having your enhancement and bug fix needs met in a timely manner.
• How likely is it that you will be charged for enhancements? It is within the right of every vendor to charge for enhancements requested by customers that will require major amounts of costly work with limited general market appeal. Enhancements like these aside, vendors can take different strategies toward enhancements. Some view development as a profit center, and view client enhancement requests as an opportunity to raise revenue. Other vendors view development as a cost center. They try their best to offer enhancements under the terms of existing software maintenance agreements, and view enhancement requests as a way to improve the customer experience while adding to the long term attractiveness of the product.
5. What are your vendors references like?

Checking your vendor’s references is so important that we’ve devoted an entire additional blog post to the topic. In summary you should:

• Delay checking references until the end of the evaluation process. At this point, you will have a better idea of the questions you’d like to ask references. Ideally, these are the type questions that are impractical for the vendor to address as part of the regular sales process.
• Share your questions with your vendor sales staff. He or she can then try to match you up with references to answer specific questions.
• Be open-minded relative to the references that you speak with. Of course it would be ideal to speak with a reference “just like you”. This might not be practical given the different ways companies even in the same industry apply scheduling software. Rather judge references based more on how well they answer your questions than surface level similarities.

While choosing the right advanced planning and scheduling / production scheduling software is important, so is picking the right vendor. Given the potential complexity of scheduling software, deciding on the right vendor to partner with can have a big impact on your success. Choose wisely!

As we’ve advocated elsewhere in this blog, we feel it is important that your vendor work with you to develop a sample scheduling model that shows how the software would map onto your real world situation. It is the only way to know for sure that you have a fit. Let’s say you’ve taken this step. Also let’s say that you have worked with more than one vendor to map advanced planning and scheduling / production scheduling software onto you environment. What if the software looks very similar to you? How do you choose?

Your next step should be to concentrate on the vendor. You need to pick the vendor that will be your best partner to help you unlock the full potential of advanced planning and scheduling software. The questions below might help in this process:

1. In the process of building the sample production scheduling model, how well have you and the vendor worked together?

   How well you work with vendor staff members prior to the sale is a strong indicator of what it will be like to work with them after the sale. This is particularly true if the same staff will be working with you pre and post sales. You might want to ask yourself the following questions:

   • Does the vendor put your needs first? Is he or she curious about fully understanding your needs and goals, or does he or she fixate on functions and features, a good many of which won’t even be relevant to you?
   • Does the vendor seem knowledge about production and operations environments or is he or she a “software geek”? Deep production experience is important in properly applying planning and scheduling software. The more real world experience the vendor has the better.
   • Does the vendor seem reliable, or do your phone calls and emails go unanswered for long periods of time? If a vendor isn’t responsive before the sale is made, they will only be worse after
2. How much continuity will there be between vendor pre-sales and post-sales staff?

   You may really like your vendor’s sales and pre-sales consulting staff, but there are no guarantees that you will get to work with them after the sale. While maintaining the same staff pre and post sales is clearly in the best interests of the customer, most software companies have their most senior staff work only with prospective customers. In their minds, more is at stake. After the sale, they turn consulting and implementation tasks over to more junior employees. Unfortunately, you as the customer will often then have to devote time (and money) to bringing the new vendor staff up to speed on your application (usually while paying their consulting rate). You also may find that promises made by sales staff are “forgotten” when new implementation staff take over.

   If you suspect there is going to be such a hand off, you might want to ask the following questions:

   • What are the backgrounds of implementation staff members?
   • What is the sales team going to do to educate the implementation staff on my account?
   • Who is going to be my point of contact? What level of access might I still have to pre-sales staff?
   • How do we resolve potential discrepancies between the positions taken by vendor pre and post sales staff?

Look for additional questions for vendors in our next post.

There are two things to keep in mind. First, vendors are going to do everything in their power to screen out negative references and only give out positive ones. Therefore, any reputable vendor who has been in business for more than a couple of years is going to be able to give you references that will say good things. Second, when a reference takes time out of his or her busy day to share experiences, the reference is doing both you, and the vendor a favor. Since vendors won’t want to impose upon and unduly burden their best customers, they are going to limit the number of references you speak with. Furthermore, if you are as busy as most people who work in production environments, you are not going to have time to talk to numerous references.

So, in practical terms, you are going to have limited chances to talk to references. How do you make the most of these opportunities? One strategy is to ask for references early in the process, and use the references to screen vendors. If you do so, you’ll be squandering an opportunity. At this point in the process, you might not know what the most important issues will be for your intended use of the software. In addition, it will be hard to screen vendors based on references that are going to be hand-picked to be positive.

A far better strategy is to hold off contacting references until near the end of your evaluation. Evaluating complex software such as advanced planning and scheduling can be an involved process. Don’t try to make a choice immediately. Share with your vendor your goals for the software, how your operations are structured, who will be using the software, and the data that you have available. Educate the vendor so that, in turn, they can educate you on how their production scheduling software might apply in your environment. How well a vendor works with you prior to the sale is a good indicator of what it will be like after you’ve paid the vendor’s invoice. As advocated elsewhere in this blog, working with your vendor on a sample production scheduling model prior to the sale can be invaluable in determining if the software, and the vendor, will meet your needs.

While the process of working with a vendor prior to the sale can be invaluable, it won’t answer all of your questions. In fact the process most likely will produce questions that hadn’t occurred to you earlier. Many of the questions will be fairly general, but more than a few will be specific to how you plan to apply the advanced planning and scheduling software to your environment.

Share your questions with your vendor’s sales staff! If your vendor understands your questions, they can take steps to get you answers. A smart vendor will listen to your questions, and match you up with references who have dealt with the same issues that you are raising.

While it would be ideal for your vendor to match you up with a reference “just like you”, it pays to look beyond the superficial. Companies in similar industries often go about satisfying their customers in very different ways. Also, just because two a companies are in the same industry doesn’t mean that they necessarily have the same goals for the production scheduling software. One might want software for scheduling over a short horizon, while the other may want to do longer range planning. While the references your vendor introduces to you may be in a different industry, below the surface you may have much in common.

What kind of questions might you want to ask production scheduling and advanced planning and scheduling references? Below is a list of less obvious questions that might be helpful:

• How well did the production scheduling / advanced planning and scheduling software meet your expectations?
• How well has the vendor kept promises made to you before you purchased?
• How smooth was the handoff between the vendor’s sales staff and implementation staff?
• How responsive have the vendor’s support and development staffs been to issues which have arisen and to enhancement requests?
• How expert in the software are the vendor’s consulting and implementation staff, and how quickly have this staff picked up the nuances of your business?
• How did you make use of the vendor’s staff during your implementation?
• Did the vendor help you draft an implementation plan, and if so, how useful was it?
• How smooth and problem free was your implementation?
• What kind of unplanned expenses and costs were passed on to you?
• What business benefits did the production scheduling / advanced planning and scheduling software help you achieve, and how quickly did you get those benefits?

Advanced Planning and Scheduling systems have a reputation for requiring excessive data. Whether or not this is true depends upon the capabilities of your scheduling system, and your goals for it. Ideally, you will have picked a vendor with deep experience helping customers be successful in a wide range of different industries. This experience should have bred a sensible approach to scheduling embodied in a practical production scheduling software product.

As is generally the case with most real world problems, the most workable approach to scheduling is to “start simple” and to build on success. With respect to data, this approach involves starting initially with minimal amounts of data, and augmenting and refining the data over time. The “start simple and build strategy” makes particular sense for data since it costs money (time, effort) to collect and maintain data, and you only want to access data that is truly useful. To support this strategy, initially your production scheduling software should be able to generate decent schedules with minimal data. However, the software should also give you the capability to add and refine data over time, and to see corresponding increases in schedule accuracy.

What data do you need to start with?

1. Primary resources to schedule – can be machines, tooling, people or material.
2. When the resources are available – i.e. their calendars and shifts.
3. Routings – the steps or operations orders go through in their production. For each step, the duration each resource is required.
4. Requirements to schedule – often called orders. Typically, an order has a quantity and a due date.
5. Priority – some “rule” which determines the sequence in which orders and / or operations are scheduled. For example, one simple priority rule is earliest due date.

What data should you be able to add over time? The software should be able to handle all of the data required to model both your operation and the way you want to schedule that operation. Different industries can have unique data needs. Below are a half a dozen examples of different types of data:

• Additional resources which are required along with the primary resource to perform an operation. Examples might be labor, tooling and material in combination with a primary machine.
• Groups of alternate resources that are able to perform an operation.
• Complex relationships between operations in a routing. For example, sequential, overlap, parallel as well as complex networks of operations.
• Characteristics by which operations should be grouped, sequenced, and scheduled back to back on a resource to reduce set up time. Also, the associated time penalty that occurs when changes in characteristics occur.
• Characteristics of operations that can be grouped together for batch processing, for instance in ovens. Also, the associated oven capacity.
• Values that determine how an operation should be split over machines with similar capabilities.

Where can you obtain production scheduling related data? The first place to look is your business system (ERP system), or other company data bases. Systems such as these should provide the basic data needed to generate initial production schedules. Unfortunately, production scheduling is an afterthought in most ERP systems. Therefore, rarely are such systems designed to hold the more detailed data that might be required to refine your production schedules.

If you need detailed data, you are probably going to need to turn to the true experts – your shop floor staff and industrial engineering group. Often these staff members will hold the data you need in their heads, or in personal data bases (e.g. in Excel).

Once your data is identified, the next step is to get it into an easily acceptable electronic format. One option is to add this data to your business / ERP system or company data base in unused or user defined fields.

An alternative to adding scheduling related data to your ERP system or company data base is to add it directly to your production scheduling or Advanced Planning and Scheduling system. The scheduling system should be designed for easy data input. In addition, it should have features designed for easy maintenance and change of bills of material and routings, which is where most of the specialized scheduling related data resides.

How should you access the data? Some data is best held and maintained in company ERP and business systems, and other data is best held and maintained in the Advanced Planning and Scheduling software. Your scheduling software should contain interface tools for transferring data easily and efficiently between systems. In addition, the software should have rules for merging different data from different sources in a seamless manner (e.g. combining data resident in the scheduling system with data transferred from ERP).

So, how can you satisfy the data needs of your production planning and scheduling system? By starting with readily available data and collecting more complex, detailed data over time, by storing the data in the system that makes the most sense, and by using the data transfer and data merging capability of your Advanced Planning and Scheduling system to pull the data together for effective use.

 Advanced planning and production scheduling is an incredibly powerful technology, but it is not a magic wand.  The technology doesn’t fit in all environments, and it can’t solve all business problems.  Depending upon the specifics of your operation, advanced planning and scheduling can also be a bit tricky to implement.  To know if the technology can help in your environment, you both need a roadmap on where you want to go, and be able and willing to dig into the details.

 Some production environments are simple and straightforward, and your operations might fit into this category.  However, your plant might also have unique twists or rules that influence how work gets done.  These unique characteristics may be “how we’ve always done things”, and therefore, be ripe for change and simplification.  However, many of the unique aspects of how you manufacturer product are unique for a reason.  You’ve developed proprietary processes over the years that give you an advantage over your competition.  In order to be successful, your planning and scheduling software needs to be able to capture and reflect the legitimate intricacies of your business.

 So, how do you know if a production scheduling solution can solve your problems?  You build a sample model, and use the model to test the application the software to your real world situation.

Any reputable, experienced vendor understands that a sample model is the only way to truly know how well the software will fit you.  If the vendor won’t work with you on a sample model, either they don’t know how to build one (maybe they are a marginally trained distributor), or they have something to hide.  Whichever is the case, if they aren’t willing to work with you, find another vendor.

 While your vendor should be willing to work with you on a sample advanced planning and production scheduling model, any vendor worth his or her salt is going to have strong ideas on how the process should work.  These strong opinions should be based on experience building similar sample models for other customers.  At a minimum, if you haven’t done so already, the vendor should insist that you:

• Involve in the process staff members who might either use the software directly, or use the output from the software.  The only way you are going to develop good criteria for evaluating the sample model is by getting important users and decision makers lined up.
• Get consensus as to your organization’s specific, measurable goals for the planning and scheduling software.  These goals will influence how the sample model is built and will guide the justification of the technology.
• Get commitment to help from staff which might be responsible for providing the planning and scheduling system with required data.  Sources of data might range from formal company data bases to informal data held in the head of shop floor staff.  Planning and scheduling software won’t work without proper data, and if the proper data isn’t available, why bother with the exercise?
• Get sanctioning from decision makers.  Again, why bother with the exercise if decision makers aren’t on board.

 Building a representative sample model is a significant undertaking.  You should plan on considerable amounts of your time to educate the vendor on the details of your operation.  While the sample model will require effort on your part, please remember that the vendor’s investment will be much greater both in real and proportionate terms.  Depending upon the magnitude of the investment that your situation requires, the vendor might ask you for one or more of the following:

• The explicit criteria which you will use to make your decision
• Your criteria for justifying the software (if you think you’ll have trouble justifying, get help from your vendor)
• The specific steps in your decision making process
• The specific steps needed to approve an expenditure for the software and associated services.
• A commitment that you will purchase if the sample model adequately addresses your needs
• A purchase order for services to help defray the cost of building the sample model.

 While building a sample advanced planning and production scheduling model is not free in terms of time and potentially money, the process should help you understand:

• The data needs of the software.
• How your data will  look in the software
• How the software will be used on a periodic basis (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly)
• How the software will be used to solve specific organizational problems
• What your organizational training needs are
• What the implementation of the software will look like
• In round numbers, how much it will cost to purchase and implement the software and what the economic benefits of the purchase will be

 Building a sample model will greatly reduce the risk that you purchase a technology that won’t help you reach your goals or won’t work properly in your environment.

A major “gotcha” can occur when the ERP vendor has acquired their planning and scheduling technology through an acquisition of another company.  In recent years there has been tremendous consolidation in the ERP / MRP space.  ERP vendors have acquired production planning and production scheduling vendors.  The acquiring ERP vendors have since themselves been acquired by other ERP vendors, sometimes multiple times.  Often these acquisitions are driven by financial and marketing concerns rather than a desire to build a rational and technically sound product line. 

With every acquisition, consolidation of product lines and staff occurs, and application expertise departs.  Due to all the acquisition activity, some vendors have been left with a pile of different applications puzzle pieces.  Rarely do these puzzle pieces fit into any kind of a coherent whole.  Prospective customers interested in the technology are left with applications that aren’t truly integrated, and vendor staff who don’t know their own products. 

Another major pitfall involves vendors who have developed advanced planning and scheduling software to cover their competitive flanks.  Typically, these vendors are large and have deep pockets.  While these vendors may be able to assign top notch programming talent to developing production planning and production scheduling software, they still need application experience to know what needs to be developed.  Strong development capability doesn’t translate in a deep base of domain experience or experience implementing with real world customers.  The situation is compounded by the fact that, unlike MRP, there is no published, standard, well accepted, set of product features that an advanced planning and scheduling system should have.  The best planning and scheduling applications have been developed over many years by vendors dedicated to the technology with significant feedback from customers “in the field”. 

Vendors with no affinity for the technology often develop applications that look great on the surface.  However, when you dig into them, you find they lack depth and are full of functional holes.  Furthermore, when you implement, you’ll often find that there is no one at the vendor who truly understands the application, or who has the necessary experience to make customers successful.

So as not to get burned, ask the following questions: Will you prototype the planning and scheduling application with my data and show it dealing with my scheduling issues?  Can you show me data moving from the ERP system to the planning and scheduling system and back again?  How will the planning and scheduling application be loaded on my computers?  Can I talk to references that will vouch for the success of the application?  Can I see the resumes / CVs of the staff responsible for implementing?  How many successful planning and scheduling implementations have they managed?

Unsatisfactory answers to any questions should be cause for serious concern.  Be particularly wary of vendors that tell you not to worry about production planning and production scheduling until after the rest of the ERP system is up and running.  Don’t fall for this sales technique often used to hide product weaknesses, or lack of planning and scheduling expertise.  If you are interested in planning and scheduling, make sure the vendor demonstrates the software to you up front, with your data, and shows how the application will solve your real world problems.