Making Time; the art of Scheduling

Scheduling in Visual sure beats the white board!

If you were to take a poll, most companies would put plant scheduling as one of the top reasons that they choose Visual Enterprise as their company’s ERP system. However, if you also asked those same companies how well that worked out for them...

The truth is that scheduling is one of the most difficult features to implement and keep working in any manufacturing software package. Making scheduling work in your organization requires a philosophical buy-in (not all scheduling packages are created to solve the same problems), a tenacious commitment and serious execution discipline.

Visual’s system is no different. While it is powerful, and for the right company can be an enabler of success, getting scheduling to work is not an automatic win. Most other parts of the system must be working correctly before you can even consider starting to rely on output of the scheduling system.

“The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”
-- Stephen R. Covey

The complexity of Visual Enterprise’s Concurrent Scheduler is both a key strength and its Achilles’ heel. Inexperienced organizations get tripped up by making bad choices in the most innocuous areas of the system.

These bad choices can include inappropriate definitions of shop resources, poor choices for units of measure, lax discipline in updating customer orders and work orders, failure to maintain delivery dates in purchase orders and a whole host of other gremlins that will ensure scheduling failure.

Most companies that are trying to schedule are attempting to solve one of these problems:

These are all difficult scenarios that require thoughtful application of the tools that are available in Visual Enterprise. Achieving real results with Visual's scheduling system requires commitment, discipline and guidance from someone who has been there and done that.

That's the bad news. The good news is that it really isn't that hard to make Visual work so that you can schedule. Yes, it is going to require some sweat equity and a willingness to change engrained habits. But once those hurdles are cleared, you will find that using Visual correctly makes your entire business run smarter and better. At the end of the day, scheduling becomes just the icing on a very tasty cake.

I am Kurt B. Carr and I have years of experience in teaching companies how to use Visual Enterprise as a tool to operate effectively and achieve success. Call (941.776.3830) or email me today to schedule some of my time to improve your on-time delivery.

I can help...

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