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.
Represent your manufacturing business using master data. Link the planning and scheduling system to the real world.
Excel-based planning systems give you more flexibility. Flexibility within the realms of the possible. Here are the essentials of master data and how they map onto your business.
ERP often fails to give you the flexibility and visibility that you need.
Excel use has its own problems with spreadmarts and spreadsheet sin.
Apply this technique and take control over your planning and reporting. Getting Excel to perform like a business system.
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.
Predictive planning provides a way to manage uncertainty. Planning can resolve the dilemma between schedule-push and demand-pull.
How an Excel-based predictive planning tool can work alongside the business transaction system.
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.
This is a guide to help you use calendars in planning and scheduling.
Production capacity starts with calendars – here’s how to make a calendar and calculate in Excel.
Capacity planning compares minutes of production with days of resources. Here is an easy way to convert minutes to days over any working calendar.
This technique also helps to simplify many Excel date calculations for working days and times.
“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.
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.
Analytics for demand planning in Excel usually involves big tables of data.
To understand the demand for a product, you need to look into its history. An order history can easily have 100K+ records.
Here is a technique to perform fast analytical formulas on many thousand rows.
The dilemma of demand planning: to use a forecast or history.
We cannot expect history to repeat itself, yet every day we are reminded of inaccuracy and bias in the forecast.
How to combine the forecast and history to get a true measure of demand.
If you do not know your supply constraints, then it is likely your constraint is the MRP system.
How to use constraints-based planning and overcome the limitations of MRP logic.
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:..
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
Today, manufacturing excellence is built on execution. Lean manufacturing places emphasis on daily execution to customer demand. It favours a system of visual signals on the factory floor to replace computer planning and paper reports. Does this mean that production scheduling is in conflict with best practices of lean and demand-driven production? Certainly not. Scheduling goes far beyond Master Production Scheduling, is an essential part of integrated planning and a powerful way to model real-world constraints in a supply chain.
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:
Many of the tools, templates and systems that we build use macros in Excel. Some of you will be quite capable and experienced with Excel macros and VBA. Others could be coming across Excel macros for the first time. Excel 2007 upwards has some additional security for running macros. If
Excel-based planning and scheduling systems need data. Best practices in developing Excel systems say: “Separate data storage, calculation and reporting.” A database the best place to store data. Our Excel tool needs to bring it in, perform calculations and then send it back out. The output tables can