Partnership with ERP/MRP Vendors
Schedule Engine / Visual Scheduling for Manufacturing/ERP Developers
This option is intended for the ERP Vendor that wants to add Advanced Scheduling capability by ultimately integrating using JobTime's "SmartSched" technology, to add an effective Level 1-Machine Constraint 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 more powerful JobTimeŽ 5 Advanced Planning and Scheduling solution, which can serve the scheduling needs of your most demanding ERP clients. JobTimeŽ 5 provides a powerful schedule engine. This technology seamlessly transmits your ERP data into JobTime. 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 in consecutive shifts of each operation. 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 price quotes prices based on any of the JobTimeŽ 5 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 JobTimeŽ 5 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:
|
We strongly recommend starting with a loosely coupled SQL interface between your ERP system and our off-the-shelf JobTimeŽ 5 APS system. This initial approach will allow both your company and ours ample time needed to become thoroughly familiar with one another's technology and system features.
Following a series of several successful implementations among your client base, we can, if you prefer, move forward with a tightly integrated technology, in which you alter your screens to allow data entry of all parameters allowed by JobTime's technology, and the schedule engine will then be running fully integrated "under the hood" inside your own ERP system.
ERP Seamless Integration of JobTime's Advanced Planning and Scheduling Technologies
JobTime Systems, Inc. also 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 object-based technology. We collaborate with you to define and design new user interface screens you will need, and define new database elements you will need to add to your ERP system. We direct the specification of user interfaces to access our own technology building blocks, which include .NET and COM interfaces, to access our schedule engine and schedule board, based on JobTimeŽ 5 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 JobTimeŽ 5, 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 a quarter-century of business focused on the advanced planning and scheduling in order to achieve both accurate and fast shop scheduling to support 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 and client mission is specifically focused on materials. JobTime focuses intently on capacity. In high-volume, repetitive manufacturing, with high materials cost, such as food and beverage, materials management is the key driver in manufacturing software. Today ERP vendors increasingly recognize the proven benefits delivered by capable scheduling systems. We recognize that the reluctance to enhance scheduling is the well known fact that developing a high quality advanced Multi-Resource scheduling system, can easily equal or exceed the original cost of developing the MRP component of modern ERP systems.
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. This is true across the board in manufacturing, in both repetitive and order-driven manufacturing applications. Even with advances in 'order-less scheduling', make-to-stock manufacturing companies see that moving to 'Global World Class' status demands solutions on remaining finite-resource limited capacity issues that constantly restrict output on Lean-Cell Toyota Model manufacturing. Scheduling of maintenance, critical customer back-orders, receipt-to-ship visibility also increase the need for greater visibility and accuracy in scheduling systems, particularly in the traditional MRP repetitive make-to-stock manufacturing markets.
Over the past 28 years, some large manufacturing companies, anxious to gain a better scheduling solution, not provided by ERP Vendors, have often invested millions of dollars to create in-house finite scheduling applications, but often with only limited success because they are in the manufacturing business, not in the finite-capacity / multiple-resource scheduling business, like JobTime Systems, Inc.
As an ERP Vendor, it is prohibitive to match JSI's same level of 100 man-years of APS development effort. 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 the budget you will require to develop your new Advanced Scheduling system from scratch on your own.
For example, an ERP Vendor 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 cannot optimize setup changeovers in multiple work-centers simultaneously, nor be able to offer Multiple Resource constraints, subject to multiple calendars with unique holidays per labor-resource. Nor will it be able to simultaneously model assembly constraints on in-house make-items, event-based simulation of inventory receipts and issues, or give accurate estimates of critical timing of net requirements.
Mid-range manufacturing clients now demand greater scheduling accuracy, and with good reason. They recognize their scheduling needs to recognize (and be able to prove that it recognizes) realistic shop-resource constraints, because they need to beat deliveries from competitors operating from any part of our the new global economy. This means they need to accurately schedule AND deliver in order to consistently match global competitors. They need to quote realistic due-dates, while simultaneously recognizing ALL other delivery promises. A single constraint scheduler which still 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 respective division of responsibilities and effort applied to 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
By using JobTimeŽ 5'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.
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. JobTimeŽ 5 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 |
Please submit our Information Request Form and identify yourself as an ERP/Vendor at this link.