Successful scheduling deals with analysis, review, and manipulation of all data that impacts production machines, work centers, production orders, production lines, and other related resources of the manufacturing process. It also requires complex calculations that are immediately applied to manipulated schedules or any supporting data. More importantly, it requires immediate display of calculation results, especially when scheduling issues arise.

Previously, you needed numerous QAD Enterprise Edition (EE) menus to effectively view or manipulate schedule data, which could be time consuming and cumbersome. Now, new scheduling tools are provided through the.NET UI that let you effectively plan and schedule resources for a master schedule or a production schedule from a single workbench for each type of schedule.

You can select the Planning and Scheduling Workbenches from the .NET UI’s list of applications. When you do, you have access to:

Initially, building a master schedule, then a subsequent production schedule, was done in a step-wise manner using several reports and maintenance screens, which was a cumbersome process. Now, you can concurrently plan and schedule production in a single process/toolset.

Schedules built through MSW or PSW let you build schedules that assist in doing the right production order in the correct order and consumes less time for you when building them.

Providing tools to build schedules is not enough, though, if you cannot monitor and manage component shortages. For that reason, several shortage-monitoring features are also available when you are building effective schedules.