Production Planning and Scheduling Software for Manufacturers

Seiki Interactive Advanced Manufacturing Planning and Scheduling Board

Fast, Flexible and Responsive

The Seiki Scheduler helps you improve on-time delivery, respond faster to change, maximise utilisation of your critical production resources and make better scheduling decisions using real production capacity.

Advanced Manufacturing Planning and Scheduling

Our manufacturing planning and scheduling software factors in your actual capacity to generate production plans that strike a balance between customer’s delivery date demands and managing the workload efficiently and effectively. As a decision support tool, it can improve your responsiveness to both every-day challenges or sudden changes, as well as identify and justify opportunities for improvement or investment.

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Advanced Planning and Scheduling can help you to:

Understand the sequence of operations in the manufacturing process
Take into account complex interdependencies
Know when the machines or resources are required for each works order and when they will be available
Control and modify the timings and delays between operations for more realistic production lead times
Monitor the live progress of each works order on the shop floor
Measure performance against plan
Use people’s time more effectively

Key features demo

Watch this 25-minute deeper dive live demo recording for more detailed information about how the system works.

Introduction to Advanced Manufacturing Planning and Scheduling (APS) Video

Advanced Planning and Scheduling Timeline View

Interactive Graphical Planning Board

One of the key features of the software, that makes it easy to use and simple to learn, is the interactive graphical planning views. They provide a fast visual summary of the loading of all active orders and the essential production information of individual operations.

Seiki Manufacturing Capacity Planning

Finite Capacity Planning and Scheduling

Your actual capacity is taken into account from the moment you start to plan, helping you to work leaner. For example, stock levels are reduced as materials are only ordered when required, and operations are only scheduled when resources are available. And you can make adjustments in real time.

Compare Scheduling Rules

Automated Scheduling Rules

The system helps take the time, complexity and errors out of planning with built-in rules that apply a sequencing logic when scheduling works orders to produce the most effective baseline schedule. You can then harness the experience and insight of your planning team to refine and make adjustments to the plan.

View consequences of changes to the schedule

View the Consequence of Changes

The Scheduler provides you with a visual and quantifiable assessment of the impact of any changes to your overall performance and allows you to take corrective measures to minimise the effects. Create and analyse ‘What-If’ scenarios before committing to the one that meets your priorities.

Simple colour coding provides a clear visual indicator of the status of current WIP. Together the Deviations and Impact columns show the number of days that the works order will be late by and how much that has increased or decreased by as a consequence of the changes you make on the planning board – instant feedback on whether you’ve made an improvement or not. You’ll be able to see the live ripple effects of any operations not starting on time

Read how Interface Precision use the Seiki Scheduler and digital work queues

Integration with your ERP

Using our proprietary Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) software, we offer an intelligent interfacing solution to your existing ERP or MRP systems, or other industry standard databases, to the Seiki Scheduler database. EAI can support bi-directional upstream and downstream data transfer, automatically exchanging works order information for a dynamic, real-time connection between the shopfloor and production operations.

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Busy Engineering Workshop With Workers Using CNC Machinery

A standalone solution

The Seiki Scheduler also allows you to create and manage works orders directly in the system, which means you don’t have to have an ERP or other business management system to experience the benefits of advanced planning and scheduling. In fact, without any interfacing requirements, it means you can get up and running even faster.

Within the Production Orders module, you have the ability to create individual works orders or template part records that contain master operation details & routing information. The latter is particularly useful for quickly generating repeat orders.

Each record contains standard works order header information, from customer details to the required delivery date and part quantity.
When inputting operation details you can define setup, cycle and wait times, assign to a resource, and set scheduling rules such as earliest start date and no overlap.

If you subcontract operations, you can also manage a list of suppliers in the Scheduler. Individual operations can then be assigned to an ‘External Resource’ workplace, selecting the appropriate supplier from the list.

When time is a critical factor, managing complex planning and interwoven scheduling procedures in multiple, uncontrolled spreadsheets typically results in errors that can have a huge impact on the accuracy of your plan. By the time you’ve realised and investigated the source of the error your plan is obsolete. The Seiki Scheduler addresses this with a real-time, finite capacity solution so you can confidently and quickly make key planning decisions.

Additional Features

Manage part assemblies
Factor in known time delays required between operations to improve the accuracy of your schedule
Split operations if a partial shipment can be made to the customer when there isn’t enough capacity to finish the full qty in time
Allow overlapping of operations
Analyse deviations from plan (by days and count) against your defined acceptable thresholds.

Additional Benefits

Maximise the utilisation of your existing capacity
Balance revenues, customer satisfaction and operational performance
Identify untapped production capacity and reduce outsourcing
Take the time, complexity and error out of planning
Helps improve on-time delivery performance
Gain valuable insight to reduce decision and action time
Visual format for easier interpretation and understanding of information
Revitalise and enrich your ERP system with detailed manufacturing process information

Introduction to Planning and Scheduling

Let our experts take you through the key principles of our planning and scheduling software module.

manufacturing planning and scheduling

See a demo and find your perfect solution

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