Production Scheduling & Dispatch

Detailed Production Scheduling defined in ISA-95

'...the collection of activities that take the production schedule and determine the optimal use of local resources to meet the production schedule requirements'.

Sepasoft Modules used for Production Scheduling

The Sepasoft MES solution provides both the OEE Downtime and Track & Trace modules that can be used to build your Detailed Production Scheduling system.

• MES Scheduler

The MES Scheduler provides finite scheduling functionality that seamlessly integrates with the OEE Downtime and Track & Trace modules. When combined with Ignition, these scheduling features allow operations to easily adapt to last minute or frequent changes that commonly occur in production environments. This is accomplished by monitoring production in real-time, handling delays, production routes, scheduling changes, notification of production priority changes and more.

Most manufacturers rely on ERP and Inventory Management Systems to handle the complex process of inventory planning, high level customer order scheduling, routing, transportation logistics and accounting. However when it comes to the detailed planning and scheduling of shift personnel, production lines and maintenance activities, this tends to occur at the MES level. If scheduling information and production performance data is stored in separate systems, whether in spreadsheets or stand-alone scheduling software, that cannot be accessed and combined, we're missing the opportunity to provide powerful insight into operational activities and production line utilization.

The Scheduler provides finite scheduling functionality at the MES layer that allows operations, maintenance and planners to create a detailed web based schedule that can pull work orders directly from ERP, allowing them to be modified at the MES level to account for last minute changes, and shared with everyone within the organization. With our direct connection to actual production line status and counts, the schedule can provide real-time status monitoring of actual vs scheduled production, automatic handling of delays and updates of inventory consumption and order fulfillment data back to ERP, as well as providing schedule adherence analytics to help drive continuous improvement initiatives. 

With flexibility in mind, work orders and production schedule entries can be created in the following ways:

• From Customer Orders or Schedule Entries in ERP or other scheduling software
• Manually created using the Work Order Table and Line Schedule View components
• Dynamically generated using scripting
• Imported from other sources