Scheduling Solutions has developed skills in the use of PowerPivot, a free Microsoft developed add-on to Excel, to help companies analyse large databases to find meaningful information.

Scheduling Solutions has developed a Tracking and Recording System (TRS) to track the progress of jobs or works orders in progress in Production.

The TRS integrates with Preactor, when installed, to provide accurate schedules by ensuring that the start point and production activity status’s of jobs in production is known.

Preactor Express is the latest addition to the Preactor family of production planning and scheduling solutions. It is free to use and it will allow you to take your first steps on the ‘… path to scheduling excellence’.

Preactor Express will also let you start to reap the proven benefits that have been obtained by the thousands of companies worldwide who are already using Preactor software.

Preactor 200 FCS is the first of the FCS solutions that is capable of being tightly integrated with other packages as well as Preactor Viewers.  The SQL database can be altered by editing a text file that is read by Preactor when it loads and automatically makes the changes to SQL.  The menu system can also be changed.  An event based messaging system can be used to pass data between applications.

Orders can have a ‘Delivery Buffer’ defined that can be customer or product specific.  This is a time period which is used to offset the due date reference when an order is backward sequenced and also provides a warning when operations are scheduled within the buffer.

Whereas in Preactor 200 FCS the ‘secondary resources’ are modelled as having infinite capacity, in Preactor 300 FCS these can be either modelled as infinite or finite so is a multiple constraint finite scheduling system.  Hence operators, tools and any other secondary constraint can be used as a constraint in generating the schedule.

The capacity of ovens, furnaces and tanks can also be modelled using secondary resources to restrict the number batch sizes within them.  Attributes of orders or products can be used to restrict which orders can go together say in an oven or tank.

Preactor 400 APS has additional functionality to deal with more complex scheduling problems and in addition focuses on the restrictions imposed by materials.  Many ERP systems will create orders for each level of the Bill of Materials (BoM).  These could be manufacturing orders or materials that are purchased.

Using an in-built tool, these orders are connected or pegged together and the materials produced netted off.  These links are used as part of the scheduling process

Preactor 500 APS takes materials control a step further.  It has an Advanced Material Control (AMC) feature. In this, materials can be produced or consumed at any operation step within an order.

This means that both by-products and co-products can be modelled in Preactor and used as constraints.

Preactor 500 APS also has a BoM exploder (PBX) that can be used to carry out Bill of Material explosions during a Capable to Promise Enquiry.