Production planning scheduling software, from order list to shop floor in four steps
ProductionPlanning.ai turns the order list you already have into a schedule every machine can actually run. There is no six month ERP project in between: four steps, your own data, and a first schedule in days.
Step 1. Enter orders and routings
Start with what you already keep. Open orders go in with four columns that matter: product, quantity, due date and priority. Then each product gets a routing, meaning the work centers it passes through in order and the minutes each operation takes per unit.
- Typed in the app on every plan, or imported from a spreadsheet or your ERP export (Plant plan and above)
- One routing per product, reused by every order for that product
- Alternative work centers per operation, so a job can move when a machine is busy
- Materials per product, so the schedule can check shortages (Plant plan and above)
If the routings live only in someone's head today, this is the step that moves them into the company. Writing the routings down is worth doing for its own sake.
Step 2. Set shifts and work centers
List your machines and work cells, then tell the scheduler when each one works. Capacity is the part a spreadsheet never knows, and it is the part that decides whether a promised date is real.
- Shifts per work center, including a second or third shift on the machines that need it
- Holidays, planned maintenance and known downtime
- Setup time when a work center switches between product families
- Efficiency per work center, if a machine never runs at its book rate
The result is the real number of productive hours on every work center, day by day. Our guide on how to calculate machine capacity walks through the arithmetic.
Step 3. Run the schedule
Run the schedule. The scheduler places every operation of every order on a work center, one after another, inside the shifts that work center has, counting setup time wherever the product changes.
- Earliest due date on every plan, with shortest operation first and customer priority as rules to choose from (Plant plan and above)
- Finite capacity: a full machine pushes the next job to its next free window
- Projected finish date for every order, next to its due date
- Late orders marked with the number of days they will miss by
- The bottleneck work center named, with its utilisation for the period
- Material shortages listed per order, item and date (Plant plan and above)
On the Plant plan and above, run the same orders under a different rule, or with an extra shift on the bottleneck, and compare the two versions side by side before you publish either.
Step 4. Send it to the floor
On the Plant plan and above, a published schedule becomes a queue for each work center, shift by shift. Operators see what to run next on a screen at the machine, a tablet or a phone, and mark each job started and done.
- One queue per work center, in the order the schedule chose
- Start and finish from the floor, with actual quantities
- Planned against actual time, so routings get more accurate every week
- A breakdown marked on the floor reschedules the rest of the week in one click
On the Line plan, the planner reschedules after a breakdown in one click and shares the same Gantt chart with the floor. This is the loop that keeps the plan honest. Read more about shop floor scheduling software and production planning and control.
What production planning and scheduling software changes after the first week
- The morning meeting starts from one shared schedule instead of three versions of a spreadsheet.
- Sales quotes dates from projected finish times, not from memory.
- The bottleneck machine is known by name and planned first.
- Late orders show up days ahead, while there is still time to add a shift or call the customer.
- A breakdown costs a click, not an afternoon of moving rows.
See the four steps on a real week of orders
The demo on the home page runs the same engine on a machine shop, a bakery or a fabrication shop. Change the orders, switch off a machine, and watch the schedule recalculate.
Your data stays yours. Export or delete it any time. No card to try the demo.