In times of shortage, how do you allocate inventory to customer orders?
It is tempting to fall back on hard allocation. This could be a mistake.
Here’s why. With a download simulation to prove it.
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Sort Out Your Customer Orders
on October 20, 2011
How To Plan for Long Lead-Time Materials
on July 27, 2011
The biggest headache in material planning is long lead-time materials.
Here is a simple tool that gives visibility between a buyer and a factory separated by a lot of water.
Also see an easy trick to connect multiple Excel users on different continents with free data integration over the cloud.
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Continue ReadingThe Most Useful Excel Function You Will Ever Learn
on June 29, 2011
I would like to introduce the most useful function that Excel has to offer.
This is the most widely used Excel function in the Fast Excel Method. When building planning systems, I find myself typing this in formulas more than any other function.
The function can transform Excel spreadsheets into a fully-blown business software platform. We use it to retrieve data, perform calculations and present them in a report.
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The most common mistake that planners make with capacity planning, and how to fix it.
Some tips on how to get good visibility on capacity in a high-mix production factory.
Download our free Capacity Planning Tool and load it with your own production data.
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Here is a Capacity Planning Tool to download, test and run with your own data.
You can see your work orders from sales, compare with available capacity. Gives you instant visibility on production capability and constraints.
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“It was easy to see where they were going wrong…”
A short story and a simple truth about capacity planning.
Also a chance to give us feedback and get free access to the right capacity planning tool for your business.
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Happy new year! A time for planning and new year resolutions.
Ouch. The word “Resolutions” doesn’t give you good feelings, does it?
I prefer habits -form them and it takes effort to break them. Here are seven good habits for using Excel for planning.
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Excel is the most widely used software for production planning. Production planning is one of the most common applications for Excel in manufacturing. Yet, there is one common mistake that people make when production planning in Excel. Avoid doing this one thing and you will save yourself hundreds of hours of unnecessary and repetitive work with production planning data. The mistake:..
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I have demand, on-hand inventory and open purchase orders. What orders can I cover with materials and which orders are going to be short? This is a simple question in material planning. We frequently get asked by clients to build spreadsheet tools that can provide an answer. You can download
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Business has a love-hate relationship with spreadsheets. Widely used, accessible and essential to running the business. They are also unsecure, error-prone and scatter silos of data across the enterprise.
Depending on your point of view, spreadsheet use can be a users’ paradise or a necessary evil. Excel is the daily work-horse to over 500 million users, yet many IT departments seem hell-bent on stamping out spreadsheets and migrating everyone to business intelligence, budgeting and ERP applications.
Here at Production-Scheduling.com, we are in the business of taming spreadsheets. You might suspect that we always come down in favour of using spreadsheets for business applications. The truth is that there is only ever one answer to the question:
Should we be using Excel to ………….. (insert your business function here)
The answer is:
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