Wyman Associates Revises SmartSched/SmartBoard
JobTime Affiliate Wyman Associates Makes SmartSched, an snap-in module for Advanced Scheduling, Including Visual Drag & Drop Scheduling
JobTime Systems, Inc.'s affiliate Wyman Associates announced that the release of SmartSched a "drop-in" advanced finite scheduling for mid-range ERP systems. SmartSched includes 'SmartBoard', a visual scheduling board. This package includes a SmartBoard OCX (Microsoft ActiveX) control for any Host ERP system capable of communicating with the Microsoft NT or Windows 95/98 platform.
SmartSched offers ERP users greater accuracy in their finite scheduling capacity, with minute-based resolution and advanced scheduling features. This is a substantial accuracy improvement over "1st generation" ERP finite scheduling systems, which schedule job-by-job, and often schedule capacity coarsely in whole days or even hours. When any given operation is shorter than the time-bucket, this often significantly under-loads the true amount of available capacity. Any manufacturing company with a significant percent of short operations (average operation less than 8 hours) will immediately see gains in scheduled capacity of 5% to 30%, typically left unscheduled by most ERP finite scheduling systems. This capacity gain is even greater if your company has very short operation times such as 30 minutes or less.
For example, if a company has average operation time of only 30 minutes, an hour-based ERP finite scheduling system blocks out the entire hour of capacity, will leave the remaining 30 minutes unscheduled. In this case 50% of capacity is left underutilized. Such systems typically report unrealistically late "finite-scheduled" finish times on many orders that you know your shop has the capacity to finish on time. SmartSched guarantees accurate scheduling computed to the second, reported to the minute, but with visible drill down to the second on the SmartBoard schedule board.
In addition, SmartSched offers a variety of 12 optional scheduling rules including due-date, critical ratio, slack, slack per operation, least remaining work, first-in/first/out, and priority. User's can even define their own user rules. For example, if user's want to schedule paint color from light to dark, they can populate an operation user-field with a paint code, and use this code as a scheduling criterion. As an example, suppose the user wants to group orders first by weekly time-fences, and to apply a schedule sequence within each time fence. The user can define a 'week-number', and attach the week-number of the order due-date to a setup code, such a color code. This means all orders are sequenced first by week number, and then by color code. The user-defined scheduling rule acts just like a compound database index key. .
SmartBoard is a built-in feature of the SmartSched software. SmartBoard adds a visual tool for managing the shop schedule, based on Workshop's orders. Dr. Paul Wyman, the company's founder and president, describes SmartBoard as "the electronic analog of the magnetic scheduling board used by production schedulers in days past."
Giving users a visual interface to their schedule allows them to quickly pinpoint their bottlenecks and unused capacity. SmartBoard's unique Drag-and-Drop Scheduling capability provides away to quickly balance the work load and bring more orders in on time, as well as maximizing capacity usage and reducing lead times.
SmartSched and SmartBoard can interfaced to any Host ERP system, which can communicate with the Microsoft Windows NT, or Windows 95/98 operating systems.
Established in 1983, JobTime has 23 years experience solving scheduling problems at many of the nation's large manufacturers. Using discrete-event simulation to model the flow of work through a shop, JobTime provides precision scheduling solutions at a cost that is affordable for businesses of every size.
For More Information Contact:
JobTime Systems, Inc.
P. O. Box 6100, San Mateo, CA 94403
Tel: (650) 570-7900
FAX: (650) 5707902
Internet: wymansoft@jobtime.com