Schedule Engine for ERP/MRP Host Systems
'SmartSched' Schedule Engine / Visual Scheduling for Manufacturing/ERP Developers
This option is intended for the ERP Vendor that wants to add Advanced Scheduling by integrating using JobTime's specific "SmartSched" technology, to add an effective finite scheduling solution to the ERP system you are marketing.
Loosely Coupled Solution
By using our JobLink-SQL technique, we can quickly provide ERP Vendors with a seamless interface to the JobTime5 Advanced Planning and Scheduling solution, which can serve the scheduling needs of your most demanding ERP clients. JobTime5 provides a powerful schedule engine. You can transmit your ERP data, and also receive back feasible schedule data. Data you receive back can include operation start and finish dates, as well as Work Order start and finish dates. You can optionally also receive uploads of 'Drill down Detail' which show the operation activity across multiple shifts. This detailed data can be the basis of more accurately calculated finite capacity requirements analysis. It also is the basis of many creative reports in JobTime, which you can then implement and add to your own ERP system.
We can provide quote you prices based on any of the JobTime5 Levels, so that you do not have to offer all features immediately. You can also offer your clients a variety of Levels, according to the complexity of their needs. If you do not have a schedule board, we can also offer collaboration and support, to help you develop your own 100% integrated scheduling option. Alternatively, your clients can use the JobTime5 Schedule board.
Consider these Advanced Planning & Scheduling benefits, based on accurate statements of plant capacity and resource usage constraints:
 | Visual Schedule Board | ||||||||||
| Management of Capacity per Resource, which includes:
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We strongly recommend starting with the approach of a loosely coupled SQL interface between your ERP system and our JobTime5 APS system. This initial approach will allow both of our companies the required time to become thoroughly familiar with one another's technology and system features. Following several successful implementations among your client base, we can, if you prefer, move forward with a fully integrated technology, with JobTime's technology running "under the hood" inside your own ERP system.
ERP Seamless Integration of JobTime's Advanced Planning and Scheduling Technologies
JobTime Systems, Inc. participates in ERP Vendor partnership APS development programs, in which we take the leadership role in the development team that can add Advanced Scheduling technology to your ERP system.
We use well designed building block technology. We collaborate with you to define and design new user interface screens you will need, and the new database tables and columns to be added to your system. We direct the specification of user interfaces to access our own technology building blocks, which include COM interfaces, and code modules, for scheduling engine and schedule board, based on JobTime5 technology elements.
JSI has anticipated the growing ERP Vendor interest in APS development partnerships. Therefore we are positioned to facilitate smooth technology transfer of component based modules of JobTime5, including our SmartBoard and SmartSched technologies.
Each ERP environment presents unique challenges, but today's modern methods of modular software development can facilitate the smooth development of integrated systems, within realistic development time-frames.
JobTime Systems, Inc. has invested over 100 man-years of product development over nearly a quarter-century of business focused on the advanced operations resource demands and modeling requirements in order to achieve accurate shop scheduling in manufacturing companies. We make our extensive APS expertise available, on a contract development basis, to assist you in defining your general and detailed requirements, and to work on a joint technology-transfer project, which will significantly improve your ERP system.
Traditionally in the first 40 years of the era of the MRP movement, ERP vendors avoided the inclusion of detailed finite capacity scheduling features for a number of reasons. The MRP focus is specifically on materials, and only secondarily on capacity. In high-volume, repetitive manufacturing, with high materials cost, such as food and beverage, materials was the significant driver in manufacturing software. Another factor playing a significant reason in the paucity of ERP promotion of detailed APS systems, is that it became well known that the development cost of a high quality Advanced Scheduling system, is so significant as to nearly equal or even exceed the cost of developing the MRP manufacturing portion of modern ERP systems.
But recently, with the rising popularity of concepts like Supply Chain Manufacturing, Lean Manufacturing & Cells, Setup Re-engineering, and Order Driven manufacturing, manufacturers now recognize an increased need for stronger and more systematic scheduling capabilities. This has increased the interest in Advanced Planning and Scheduling, especially in the order-driven markets of Make-to-Order, Engineer to Order and Assemble to Order manufacturing. Even in make to stock manufacturing, issues such as customer-driven response to back-orders, and receipt-to-ship visibility combine to increase the demand for more accurately modeled scheduling systems, even in the strongest traditional MRP markets.
Over the past 20 years, some large manufacturing companies, anxious to gain a better scheduling solution, not provided by ERP Vendors, even invested sometimes millions of dollars to create in-house advanced scheduling applications, but often with only limited success or on-going support.
As an ERP Vendor, there is no need for you to even try to match JSI's same level of 100 man-years of APS development effort. Many ERP Vendors could not even afford to do so. By creating a development partnership with JSI, we can guide and assist you in creating a very effective scheduling solution, by building our schedule engine, and even our schedule board technology, into your own ERP system, for a budget that is likely to save you from 50% to 75% of your proposed development budget to design and develop your new Advanced Scheduling system from scratch on your own.
For example, an ERP Vendors might budget 10 man-years over 18 months to cover team leader, marketing, development, testing and documentation. The resulting APS can be 'superficial' at best, typically a single constraint scheduler, that still allows infinite overloads. This is even falls short of the feature-set in JobTime5's Level 1 product line. Mid-range manufacturing clients now demand greater scheduling accuracy, recognizing their realistic shop-resource constraints, because they need to beat deliveries from the new foreign competition. This means they need to accurately schedule AND deliver in order to consistently beat off foreign competitors. They need to quote realistic due-dates, while recognizing ALL other delivery promises, and to meet them consistently. A single constraint scheduler which permits infinite overloads cannot meet this requirement, for most manufacturers.
Once your built-in APS system is developed and deployed, we follow an equitable distribution of license revenues based on how divide the responsibilities and roles of promotion, sales, training, installation, maintenance and new development. We also require open acknowledgment of our trademarks and schedule engine technology in the resulting integrated system. Your ERP product will strongly benefit by market awareness and response to advertising and labeling such as "Our ERP includes the Advanced Scheduling engine of JobTime Systems, Inc." .
SmartBoard/SmartSched Programming Strategies
The SmartSched engine, is a self-contained module, which only requires that you populate necessary data tables which match the JobTime5 data requirements, in your own database system, in order to execute JSI scheduling. Then you need to invoke the schedule engine, based on a launching form which meets the mix of features and options thatyou want to offer your customer base. SmartSched is an event-based parallel resource scheduler, which forward schedules all tasks concurrently, and provides optimal resource efficiency, when compared to job-by-job scheduling methods.
By using JobTime5's optimization options, SmartSched can perform forward-backward simultaneous re-scheduling on an entire job set. SmartSched techniques also support 'Theory of Constraints' optimization of bottlenecks, except that SmartSched optimizes multiple bottlenecks in a single pass.
The SmartBoard API (programmer's interface) lets the developer define memory models of scheduling objects including machines (resource rows in a Gantt chart), as well as each machine's calendar pattern over time. Each order to be scheduled is composed of a series of operations, across the defined set of machines. The programmer decides on the kind of priority rule to use in dispatching jobs and whether each job is scheduled forward or backward.
In SmartBoard, you can develop custom scheduling logic, for the job-by-job scheduling Each operation is identified to the SmartBoard, and from the given due-date for backward scheduling, or release date in the case of forward scheduling, SmartBoard "schedules" each operation across a series of one or more "time buckets", considering the relevant, resource calendar, and returns the operation's feasible start and finish times. The programmer schedules each operation in a loop, until all the operations of the order are scheduled. This process is then followed for each order, according to the chosen priority scheduling order. The programmer has complete freedom to implement different scheduling rules, such as setup matching, overlapping multiple resource constraints. Rules can be allowed to vary by department, and you can add unique scheduling constraints peculiar to the environment.
Our technical staff provide training to illustrate how to implement various scheduling philosophies. On-going support is also available to teach you how to add specific kinds of constraints to reflect scheduling conditions in various industries.
Available to Promise
Both SmartSched and SmartBoard have the power to return an "available to promise" date, given a current schedule, a new candidate order, its operation steps and the visibility of available (un-used) hours on each machine over time. JobTime5 has a feature named "JobQuote" which uses the SmartBoard technology for this very purpose. The rapid response (in seconds, not hours) can allow your customer support to commit the company to achievable delivery dates while negotiating with a customer on the phone, regarding a prospective new order. If the order is not placed on the spot, then the available to promise date can be calculated and quoted again, at the time of acceptance, reflecting the new conditions that exist at that time. The order acceptance procedures used in the company can be reflected in your own implementation, using SmartBoard as a "what-if" tool that can recognize current load and hours available to schedule.
Point & Click
Users can point and click on SmartBoard to see the details of the operation you define, for example: order, operation sequence, work center, setup time, process rate, process time, operation description, start, finish, on time-status, etc. A picture is worth a thousand words, and SmartBoard is a picture of your shop's execution plan.
SmartBoard Benefits
SmartBoard can improve scheduling in three important ways:
| Promising Delivery: visualize your machine loading to determine capacity available for "hot" or last-minute jobs. SmartBoard knows your current capacity commitments, and will schedule into the available un-used hours of capacity, assuring that other orders are not disturbed. You can manually moving orders, and SmartBoard can show you where the following tasks will land. This shows you the on-time impact of moving a given operation. |
| Managing Production: You can see work orders visually through the entire production cycle. You can simultaneously see all competing orders on the same machines. Make minor "fine-tuning" adjustments such as switching the to-do operation sequence without having to fully re-schedule. |
| What If Analysis: Shift your capacity (over-time or sub-contract) and see if late jobs will finish on-time. Impose a machine breakdown and see the impact. Re-schedule maintenance to pick up short-term capacity. See it now, not later. |
Features
SmartBoard lets you interact with your current scheduling data. For true Drag and Drop capability, the following features are already built in, ready and waiting for you to program your own implementation of SmartBoard:
| Zoom In / Zoom Out to view the horizon at the detail you desire |
| Highlight all operations of a given work order |
| Display late orders in red |
| Dynamically re-schedule tasks you move, recognizing working calendar |
| Move impacted tasks on the same machine accurately into the future |
| Display full part or order number by moving the mouse next to a task |
| Display the full operation detailed field dialog by double clicking a task |
| Let you re-arrange machine-center rows and re-size width of the rows |
| Scroll the board horizontally or vertically using true Windows controls |
| Validate moving a task to not violate stream or overlapping operations |
| Validate moving a task to machines not permitted as alternates |
| Validate moving a task to a date prior to the Work Order release date |
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