Production planning software: questions
The questions we are asked most often about production planning software, answered without the marketing layer.
What decisions does production intelligence cover?
Sequencing, batch sizing, changeover timing and capacity commitment. These are made together in practice and modelled separately in most systems, which is why a schedule that is optimal on paper collides with a changeover nobody costed.
How is this different from what our MES already does?
An MES executes a plan and records what happened. It is authoritative on the present and silent on the alternative. Production intelligence sits above it: it decides what the plan should be given demand, capacity and constraint, and it records what it compared before concluding.
What data does it need?
Order book, routing and capacity, changeover matrix, and enough history to learn where the standard times are wrong. That last one matters more than it sounds: standard times drift and nobody updates them, so a schedule built on them is optimal against a factory that no longer exists.
Can it run alongside our current planning process?
That is the recommended start. Run it in parallel for a few weeks and compare its schedule to the one the planner produced. Where they agree, confidence builds; where they differ, one of the two is holding a constraint the other does not know about, and finding that out is worth the exercise on its own.
Related: Demand Intelligence · Inventory Intelligence