In manufacturing, the purpose of planning and scheduling is to minimize the production time and costs, by telling a production facility what to make, when, with which staff, and on which equipment. Production planning and scheduling aims to maximize the efficiency of the operation and reduce costs.
TracePro planning receives the customers' needs from sales and marketing staff (forecast demand) and introduces these into production planning. These needs include finished product s and volume requirements with due delivery dates and prices.
TracePro helps operations, management, and engineering staff to identify the necessary resources to meet customer needs at an appropriate cost. These resources include (but are not limited to) factories, plants, departments, production lines, machines, tools, materials and labor.
With TracePro operations and engineering can collaborate with sales and marketing to develop an achievable production plan. The planning system take account the forecast demand, the initial and the target stock, the capacity and the availability of resources.
TracePro scheduling uses a shorter time horizon and a much more detailed process route than the planning. Typically the input would be manufacturing orders which have a process route associated with each defining the operation steps to make the product. The user then can load the orders onto individual resources using scheduling rules and interact with the schedule using the Gantt charts and plots that are generated by the TracePro. The output of TracePro scheduling is the job orders for each work center and each resource
