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.
Easy Date Calculations When Planning With Excel Read More »
“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.
A Simple Truth About Capacity Planning Read More »
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.
Seven Habits for Highly Effective Excel Planning Read More »
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.
Excel Demand Analytics – Fast Formulas on 65K+ Rows Read More »
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.
The Demand Planning Dilemma – Setting a Service Level Read More »
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.
Is MRP Your Business Constraint? Read More »
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:..
The Biggest Production Planning Mistake with Excel Read More »
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 a simple example of such
Build a Material Planning Tool in 10 Minutes Read More »
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.
How Scheduling Can Co-Exist with Lean Read More »
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:
The Seven Deadly Spreadsheet Sins Read More »
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 you have run macros before
Run Macros with Excel 2007 and above Read More »
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 then feed reporting and, perhaps, update the
Using Text Files to Connect Excel with Systems Data Read More »