Although software development is advancing rapidly, in many cases planning is still predominantly performed by humans, who are more or less well supported by current technologies. It is becoming apparent that artificial intelligence will support us even better in the future. But we don’t have to wait for tomorrow – even today it makes a lot of sense to support production planning with a planning system.

The advantages are numerous and obvious:

• Plan comfortably and effectively: Meet delivery dates, minimize stocks, reduce throughput times, lower production costs and at the same time be able to react flexibly to changes in plans: All these requirements can be mastered with the MES module Detailed Scheduling.
• Reduce time expenditure: The planning module takes the roughly planned production orders as well as the planned orders from the ERP system and can schedule them to the available resources in terms of capacity. The planner usually has a manual, semi-automatic or optimization-based automatic planning function at hand.
• Minimize costs: With greater planning accuracy, the production planner can minimize buffer times or react early in the event of unexpected delays, for example due to material not being delivered on schedule. Furthermore, the formation of optimal set-up sequences reduces set-up times and the associated costs. 

Author:
Dr. Karl-Heinz Gerdes
Founder and former Managing Director of FASTEC GmbH