SMB Production Scheduling Blog

Implementing a new scheduling software and superseding an outdated but (formerly) proven system is coming along with multiple challenges. Over the years, we have helped hundreds of users overcoming these challenges - many of them via an in-depth personal coaching and support. We now have condensed the experiences gained from all these customers into a comprehensive just plan it Video Academy. The Video Academy is meant to help you move to a professional production scheduling software faster and yet successfully.

In these challenging times, we are lucky. We at NETRONIC Software GmbH, the company behind just plan it, are able to continue to work and provide you with all we have to offer (read more at the NETRONIC Blog).

As such we continue to think and work on just plan it to further enhance your scheduling capabilities. So for this release we focused on you being able to better keep the focus in a complex schedule: Filtering out what you don’t need to see and highlighting what’s left.

This update may seem a bit lackluster if compared to previous releases: We “just” streamlined your production scheduling experience by changing some dialogs and removing some unnecessary steps in the processes to help you speed up your scheduling processes.

So you might ask: “Why is this the result of a month’s work?” Truth be told, it isn’t. We are working on some big enhancements to our infrastructure and the way we can bring you more updates faster. But this is nothing that we can easily show you as this is mostly work in the back-end of things.

Today's update marks the first one of 2020 and we start the year with a small update to warm up for the rest of it. I’m exited thinking about the changes we plan for this year, which will include things that may be more in the background but will help stabilize just plan it and make sure your scheduling experience is smooth to major features that will really enhance the software even further.

But for now let’s take a second (pun very much intended ;-) to take a closer look at what today brings:

This blog post reveals the 3 steps to improve your on-time deliveries by at least 30% without constant fire-fighting. We know that dealing with rush orders and with key customer inquiries often results in chaotic fire-drills. We found the formula to overcome this with professional production scheduling and with the appropriate training to succeed.

With today’s update we want to thank you, our customers, for the last year of letting us help you bring your production scheduling to the next level. We actually feel that we can look back with some pride as we made a couple of major enhancements to our production scheduling software. My personal highlights were the capability to assign 2 resources to any given task and that we - finally - cracked the code and implemented the send-ahead quantity capability to further reduce your lead times.

We also got really great and insightful feedback from all of you that allowed us to enhance just plan it in ways we ourselves wouldn’t have thought of. So before detailing this last small update of the year 2019, in the name of the entire just plan it team, I just want to say:

THANK YOU and happy holidays! We are looking forward to 2020, to continuing to work with you, and to further enhancing just plan it to best facilitate you in professional production scheduling. -- But now to the actual product update:

With finishing our current sprint and publishing a new just plan it version the continuous improvement process of our production scheduling software took the next step. This time we are showing up with a major new functionality again: with the “Send-ahead Quantity” you are able to define overlaps of subsequent tasks to reduce the throughput time. In addition we included two more new enhancements (“housekeeping”) and made the next significant step in regards of “workflow for routines”. Hereinafter I give an overview over all news that come along with the new release.

With finishing the next development sprint and publishing a new just plan it version we continued the ongoing improvement process of our production scheduling software. This time the improvement of performance was put into the focus of the development team. But we did also some „housekeeping“ and made the next step in regards of “workflow for routines”. Hereinafter I give an overview over all news that come along with the new release.

Scheduling in a high mix low volume environment is challenging in many ways. The high volatility of planning data due to ongoing and unforeseeable changes of the planning situation is not only a core characteristic of that business sector but also one main reason why scheduling is so critical.

To better clarify what I mean let's have a look at the „natural order of things“ concerning SMB production scheduling from the very beginning of a SMBs historical timeline.

With finishing our current development sprint and publishing a new just plan it version the continuous improvement process of our production scheduling software took the next step. This time we essentially focused on „housekeeping“. But in addition we included some little new enhancements that are meant to be first a step of new subject areas for future advanced enhancements. Hereinafter I give an overview over all news that come along with the new release.