Finite Capacity Scheduling

Does anyone know of a Shop Floor Scheduler that can interface with Navision Financials (Standard Product)? This customer is a large job shop. Looking for help.

Try: www.Olivia-sistemas.com

There is a finite capacity scheduler duer for release in the standard manufacturing product in Navision Solutions 3.0, but that is all I know. Have you ever successfully used a finite scheduler?

Just been to a technical day by Navision where they previewed a Solutions 3 alpha, the finite load seems to just be a couple of parameters to enter a critical load and a dampener on the loading of orders. Nothing visual like Olivia’s solution. Cheers John

Has anyone had experience in a shop / factory environment with Olivia Sistemas’ FCS product? If so, would you please share high lights and low lights of your experience?

We’re in the early days of a big implementation of which FCS is a part. The customer was very impressed by the functionality and Olivia have been very helpful. They came over for a meeting to discuss various enhancements with the customer and that sealed the deal. So far, very positive and I reckon it will remain so. Cheers John

My expectations on the finite capacity addressing in 3.0 are much higher than John P’s. As I saw in Beta2, the feature is not for Finite Scheduling, but for Finite Loading, and even though the parameters per resource are only two, the code behind it seemed quite sharp for programming operations in constrained resources Edited by - alburion1462 on 2001 Mar 31 13:11:21

Hi, Few weeks ago we discussed finite capacity scheduling on APICS meeting. It looks like this feature using 0.01% of all manufacturing companies. Your schedule must be very stable, quality of data close to 100% and it is very difficult to support this schedule. Most of companies found that it is cheaper to have excess capacity then support finite schedule. Valentin Gvozdev BMI Inc.

Alburion, the copy I saw was originally a beta which they (Navision) had rapidly downgraded back to alpha. Could be that in the intervening time it has been reworked a bit. Valentin, concur on your point. Lots of people aspire to use finite scheduling but those who actually attempt it tend to get their fingers burnt. It is not for the faint hearted. Cheers John

Hi, You cannot do finite scheduling with the existing CRP granule. First is because the system is made for a flexible approach which allows you to create orders in the past. Though the navision solutions 3.0 has a feature called contraint resources. I am not sure this will help in finite sccheduling. It is better not to expect a finite scheduling as the CRP granule is currently not equipped with the functions for complete finite scheduling. One way to handle is to write a calendar delete function which will remove the calendar entries for the past. Also restrict the system from overloading when forward scheduling is chosen. Best regards, Prashanth pbg@navilogic.com

We implemented in may and a spanish version of FCS for Navision was normalized for us. It looks good and seems to have potential but no one in the US can support it yet. It does not accomidate a job floor well but we are able to modify our expectations and the way we create Firm Planned orders.

I have a lot of experience directly in this field i.e. Finite scheduling, and as far as I am concerned there is no other type of scheduling ,i.e. there are only 24hrs in a day and 7 days in a week - Now that is as finite as it gets and anyone who can change the laws of physics, please get back to me !!For those who are interested in the Topic, the best book I have ever read on this subject is called “The Goal” by Eli Goldratt, he calls the subject , the theory of constraints. I concur with the comments made, in that, the practical shop-floor application, will have far more impact than system scheduling in implementing finite scheduling. i.e. Try MRP for the planning and use KANBAN for execution.

It’s been a long time since I saw Eli Goldratt & The Goal mentioned. OPT was his theory wasn’t it? Have you ever heard the military say “No plan survives contact with the enemy”? Well, the same applies in manufacturing, “No production plan survives contact with the shop floor”. Cheers, John