Rennie, Lindsey and Associates, Inc. is proud to announce the beginning of a whole new application. Manufacturing Scheduling will pick up where the current version of ASSIST 2K8 manufacturing leaves off. By using the routing / job step definition, we will be able to feed the necessary information to our new production scheduling optimizer. This tool takes the raw scheduled job steps and maximizes the use of the associated work centers / employees scheduled time. It calculates, by means of extensive scientific algorithms, the optimal schedule to get the most out of each work center / employee and to schedule the production order jobs so that they are completed as soon as possible.
The above screen shows the snap shot of each element of the production scheduling optimizer.
The Gantt Chart shows each work center / employee (row) calculated production order job step. Going from left to right, each step of each production order job is scheduled in the order it is to be performed to optimize that particular work center / employee. This takes the software a couple of minutes to do many production order jobs with many steps. This is probably taking you many hours to accomplish a less efficient production order schedule.
These particular sets of job steps are part of a famous job shop scheduling problem. We manually attempted to schedule these same 10 jobs, each using the same 10 employees. Our results took us over 6 hours to schedule the jobs and to put the results into some kind of user-friendly spread sheet. The best results ever published were in the low 900 minutes, to complete all jobs. This system calculated many different types of scheduling, depending upon what objective you are trying to accomplish, in less than 3 minutes. The production scheduling optimizer came up with a best time of 957 minutes, our best time was 1175 minutes.
1. The Makespan – the maximum job completion time (C max).
2. The Maximum Tardiness (T max).
3. The Total Number of Late Jobs (E Uj).
4. The Total Flow Time – the sum of job completion times (E Cj).
5. The Total Tardiness (E Tj).
6. The Total Weighted Flow Time – the weighted sum of job completion times (E WjCj).
7. The Total Weighted Tardiness (E WjTj).
These results can be manually adjusted as necessary.
The Log Book shows the result of each algorithm and the objective measurements.
The sequence shows the scheduled work center / employee jobs in sequence, for the selected algorithm.
The job pool shows each route / step for each scheduled production order job.
The production order job step detail.
The end result of this process will then be imported into our new Manufacturing Scheduling application. This application will take the scheduled production order job steps and put them into user-friendly calendars, inquiries and reports.
The ASSIST 2K8 Manufacturing Scheduling application makes available processing power hereto fore only available in manufacturing software costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. We know of no other solution available for the small / medium business (SMB) market at anything close to the low ASSIST 2K8 price.
