SMB Production Scheduling Blog

COVID-19 has hit the world and the global economy unexpected, and hard. Yet, it has also made very clear the crucial role of digitization. This is to an extent, which might even be surprising to most tech companies. De facto, digitization has become an almost mandatory need to cope with hard times and to prosper again when the economy is set to recover. Digitization enables companies to operate and grow in unpredictable environments. It lets them achieve more, and makes them agile in an operational manner. This - operational agility - is what we strive for with our just plan it software and method. Hence, we decided to not paddle back due to the crisis instead. We decided to step up and speed up in the crisis. I am thrilled to announce that we bring Production Priorities Ltd as exclusive North American reseller. As such, Dave Luckner will run our entire North American operations for JPI.

We just successfully completed our last development sprint and released the new version of our production scheduling software just plan it including the functionality to schedule components and sub-assemblies. Have a look at the release blog or the recorded webinar to learn more about this. 

With having shipped this functionality, it is about time to look ahead what is coming next and when.

As announced in the last blog post we published a new release on July 13^th, bringing the functionality to productively schedule “components” to all customers with either the Templates module or a Full subscription.

So, what exactly is new? Short answer: “components” extend the template functionality. Now you are also able to predefine routings of sub-processes related to partial products and add it to job templates as well as to jobs directly. This enables you to easily organize recurring steps of “components” within your business.

While many other software vendors went into lock-downs and Furlough processes during the past months, we actually - silently - continued our investments into our just plan it production scheduling software. Our development focus wasn't on these shiny things in the front-end. Instead, we worked hard on some long-planned major changes to our back-end in order to further enhance the stability of just plan it. In addition to this, we decided to ship customizable tooltips as well.

Implementing a new scheduling software and superseding an outdated but (formerly) proven system is coming along with multiple challenges.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: