Manufacturing project management software for CNC machine shops
A machine shop runs dozens of small projects at once. Each job has its own drawing, its own sequence of milling, turning, deburring and finishing, and its own promised date, and all of them share a handful of CNC machines. ProductionPlanning.ai manages them as one finite capacity schedule, so every job has a real finish date and every machine a clear queue.
Why generic project tools do not fit a machine shop
General project management software tracks tasks and people. A machine shop's constraint is machine hours: two jobs can both be on track as tasks and still need the same mill at the same time. That conflict is exactly what a task board does not show and a finite capacity schedule does.
- Many short operations per job, across several machines
- Setups that change with every part, fixture and material
- Second operations and outside processing, such as heat treatment or plating
- Rush jobs that push everything else
- A few machines that everything passes through
Built for mills, lathes and cells
- Work centers for each mill, lathe, grinder, deburr bench and inspection
- A routing per part, with setup and cycle time per operation
- Setup time counted wherever the part changes on a machine
- Outside processing as a work center with a fixed lead time
- Alternative machines for operations several machines can run
- Queue per machine for the operator, with the next job ready (Plant plan and above)
The worked example on the home page is a machine shop week: twelve orders, two mills, a lathe, deburr, paint and assembly, with the mill that decides which orders are late named.
Every job as a project, every machine as a constraint
- Each job with its operations on a timeline, from material to shipping
- Projected finish date for every job, next to the promised date
- Late jobs listed with the days they will miss by
- The week's bottleneck machine named, with its utilisation
- Rush jobs by customer priority, with the effect on other jobs shown
For quoting and one off work, see job shop scheduling software. For the sequence on each machine, see machine scheduling software.
See your spindles' week before Monday
Load the machine shop in the demo, or create your account and enter your open jobs.
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