Eagles need to be gathered

Master Scheduling

Conceptual Overview of MPS

MPS is a Windows based application which provides manufacturing management with the ability to view and communicate scheduling needs throughout all levels of the organization.

At the highest level, corporate management can easily view and analyze both forecast and actual demand across multiple manufacturing facilities. Product analysis can be broken down by Markets, Families, and Groups for a single plant or for multiple plants. By using “point and click”, “drag and drop”, and “drill down” window features to customize and refine the demand data being viewed, the user can see multiple windows to provide comparative analysis.

In addition to the wide variety of analysis capabilities, actual demand can be dragged between manufacturing facilities and moved in monthly, weekly, or daily time frames to improve delivery performance, smooth peaks in demand, and make optimum use of plant capacity.

Any changes the user makes to actual demand are instantly updated within the corporate database. This provides a “what if?” capability since changes can easily be revised or adjusted.

Equally important are the Database Replication features of the Database System. Theses features automatically communicate any changes down to the plant level management who are dealing with actual customer orders, production line capacities, and plant production schedules.

Forecast data can be entered at the customer or product level. At the customer level, Sales History information in the database is used to spread anticipated demand across multiple products.

A synchronization interface communicates between the plant level Order Entry application and MPS. As both new orders and revisions to orders are entered into the order entry application, the new and revised demand is updated in the plant level MPS database. The frequency of this updating is user definable.

Plant management has the ability to analyze plant level demand to determine the appropriate time frame to schedule the orders. Demand can be viewed against plant capacities for orders which are already scheduled as well as orders which have been entered into the system based on a customer requested date. This enables management to determine a valid promise date for each new order as it is captured.

Subsequently, the plant users manipulate the orders to produce detail production line schedules. The MPS system provides flexibility to allow as many production lines with as many schedule and production reporting points as management determines appropriate.

For each production reporting point defined by the user, the actual results of production are entered into MPS in “real time” mode. Typically, the entry of this data is done as a confirming transaction to minimize the amount of data entry required. The procedural aspects and logistics of each plants’ operations will control the timeliness of production into the MPS system.

If desired, a programmatic interface can be implemented to capture production results from transactions which are entered into the plant manufacturing application systems.

The same database replication features, which facilitate downward communication from the corporate level database, also provide upward communication from the plant database back to corporate. The frequency of replication for each direction is user definable.

The MPS design is unique in the industry. The system provides a four tier model of customer demand information as described on the following pages. Since all levels of management view, analyze, and manipulate demand which is represented in a common database, the decision chain is made consistent.

MPS is designed to sit on top of the manufacturing application system chosen by the user community. This allows the users to select the manufacturing application which are most closely fitted to the company needs and also to take full advantage of the MPS System capabilities. The diagram on this page represents a standard implementation configuration. More detail regarding implementation requirements is defined in the MPS Implementation Guide.

STANDARD MPS IMPLEMENTATION CONFIGURATION

Because of its ability to capture and customize systems information, MPS is capable of satisfying needs of the four basic levels in manufacturing: Corporate, Marketing/Sales, Plant Management, Production Line.

Four Tier Model

In support of the Four Tier Model, the system utilizes relational database replication technology as depicted on the following page.

Each manufacturing site has its own site specific database. This enables plant level management to view and manage order entry level demand within a customer requested delivery horizon. By analyzing new demand against current promised orders and site capacity, the guess work is taken out of committing a promise date to the customer.

At the plant level, detailed schedules are developed and the results of production are fed into the system in “real time”. An updated site specific database is published automatically (at user determined frequency) for the corporate database subscriber.

At corporate level, a wide variety of demand viewpoints enable executive management to analyze trends and manufacturing loads. The ability to shift demand between plants ensures the most efficient use of capacity and improves delivery times.

Automatic database replication features support revisions to corporate level data by making the corporate database become the publisher to its plant database subscribers. This result of database synchronization ensures that all levels of management base decisions on consistent information.

Relational Database Replication Features

The unique design features, consistent “look and feel”, ease of implementation, and ease of use combined with powerful analysis and communication tools will give the organization a significant competitive advantage.