Master Scheduling

With this module, master schedulers can translate product family production plans into an item-level master production schedule. They can also plan key components to support assemble-to-order production and monitor key production resources necessary for meeting the established master production schedule. As a result, a master scheduler can develop a realistic master production schedule that tells what products to manufacture, when to produce or purchase them, and in what quantities. The master schedule can be expressed using lot-sized orders for MRP items or orderless supply rates for JIT items.

Requirements Planning

This module plans the supply of components to meet demand. It operates in either a selective, net change, or a regenerative mode and is bucketless. It allows you to generate and maintain a simulated schedule, giving you the ability to perform "what if" analysis. It has an unlimited planning horizon and provides planners with timely exception/order action reports. For items designated for ERP production, it creates, changes, and deletes planned orders to meet demand. The orders can be planned using a variety of lot sizing techniques. For JIT items, it creates, changes, and deletes orderless supply rates to meet item demand. This rate planning technique better reflects repetitive JIT production and can be tailored to specific JIT environments with a variety of options.

Capacity Planning

In an MRP environment, this module provides load versus capacity information by summarizing time-phased load requirements by work center. This allows management to plan and monitor labor and machine requirements and adjust planned resource capacities.

Load information is based on the status of all orders in process or on planned production orders created in the Master Scheduling, Requirements Planning, and Inventory Control modules. Detail load reports and on-line graphic inquiries provide work center labor and machine load by item, order, operation, and time period. Over-capacity situations are highlighted. This information helps planners determine which orders to reschedule or reroute. For JIT parts, capacity planning is performed by Just-in-Time and CONBON techniques.

See also MAC-PAC XE Priority Manager.

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