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What is Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS)?
APS explicitly and simultaneously considers a plants limited capacity and limited material when promising delivery, planning production, planning material, planning capacity, and dealing with changes and problems. APS projects the realistic effect on delivery, utilization, and inventory of new orders, order changes, material problems, production problems, vendor problems, and business changes.
APS also possesses sophisticated what-if features. These features let management teams quickly combine formal data (e.g., orders, routings, inventory, bills-of-material, and capacity limits) and intuition (i.e., what-if ideas). APS allows them to select the best what-if ideas to continuously balance whats the best for business with whats the best for customers, as they encounter changes and problems with increasingly complex tradeoffs. The what-if features of APS often provide significant visibility and flexibility improvements over reports, staff meetings, wallboards, and spreadsheets commonly used to project, simulate, and fix ever-increasing problems.
Management teams can use APS standalone for planning, order promising, scheduling, and capacity management. APS can also be easily integrated with business systems. APS enables better use of valuable business system data to overcome the finite capacity planning and scheduling limitations inherent in business systems.
How does APS fit with ERP/MRP II?
Many manufacturers have invested significant amounts of time and money both in implementing ERP/MRP II and in collecting and maintaining the data needed to drive it. Rather than replacing ERP/MRP II, APS allows companies to continue to leverage their ERP/MRP II investment at both the master schedule and production control levels. APS uses business system data to explicitly and simultaneously consider a plants limited capacity and limited material as they promise delivery, plan production, plan material, plan capacity, and deal with changes and problems.
Which should be implemented first, ERP/MRP II or APS?
If a company has decent routing and bill of material data, APS can typically be added and implemented in a matter of weeks. It takes much longer to get benefits from most ERP/MRP II systems. Therefore, getting APS running before ERP/MRP II will often allow companies to get a return on their software investment almost immediately. Also, implementing APS will typically help companies highlight necessary data requirements and help establish the momentum that is so crucial to a successful ERP/MRP II implementation.
What does ISID can do and help in APS?
As a professional IT consulting company, ISID has 10+ years ERP consultation experience. Based on the rich ERP consultation skills and solid manufacturing industry know-how foundation, early from Year 2000 when APS just came into the world, ISID started APS practice and research. Now we have built an APS professionals team with rich APS implementation and ERP/APS integration experience, dedicated to provide customers with the best-fit and most professional consultation service.
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