How to Build a Material Planning Tool… In Ten Minutes!
Build your own Excel Planning Tool. Find out how we built a Material Planning Tool in ten minutes!
Fast Excel
How to Build Your Own Material and Production Planning and Scheduling Tools in Excel
Learn how to create your own Excel planning and scheduling tools for a manufacturing business. Some people want a spreadsheet tool so that it will solve their planning problems at the push of a button.
Others want to take it apart. Figure out how it works. Adapt it and build their own. If you’re like them, then this webinar is for you.
A Flexible Supply-Chain System Using Excel-Based Modules
How Excel-based modules can combine for a flexible planning system.
Helping You With Production Scheduling – New Webinars
We are launching webinars to help you with planning and scheduling in Excel.
Here is how you can watch us build, set up and use these free downloadable tools.
Pre-register for our first webinar coming up soon!
How Capacity Planning Gets You Halfway to Production Scheduling
Our new Capacity Planning Tool gets you halfway to production scheduling.
This article will help you understand how it calculates dates and working days in the calendar. It will go a long way towards that scheduling goal.
Download Our Capacity Planning Tool – Version 2.0
We have a new capacity planning tool for you.
Download it for free to get better visibility on production load and capacity.
Setting Customer Service Levels… Without Managing Stock Levels
Setting service levels usually starts with inventory.
Here’s a way to improve supply for important customers, that doesn’t involve inventory sizing.
And it doesn’t involve production either…
Get an Instant Rating for your Excel Planning
How does your Excel planning measure up?
Are you getting the best results or are you suffering from Excel hell?
Here is a simple measurement and a download tool that can give you an instant rating on your planning tools built with spreadsheets.
Here’s An Excel Method That Every Planner Should Know
This is a core method to apply the Fast Excel Development Method in building a planning and scheduling system in Excel.
Convert forecasts, explode demand and generate work orders — this method is something that every planner should know.
How to Share Excel Data in the Cloud
We build planning and scheduling systems in Excel.
Some systems like this material planning example have more than one user, in different locations.
Here is a way to share Excel data across multiple users by using a simple cloud service.
How To Plan for Long Lead-Time Materials
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.
Scheduling Job Shops and Engineer-to-Order – Three Alternatives that can Work
Job shop production is a challenge for scheduling.
Three ideas to job shop scheduling and other customized products when you have no standard process data.
The Most Useful Excel Function You Will Ever Learn
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.
Kick-Start Your Capacity Planning
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.
Capacity Planning Tool
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.
Easy Date Calculations When Planning With 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.
A Simple Truth About Capacity Planning
“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.
Seven Habits for Highly Effective Excel Planning
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.
Excel Demand Analytics – Fast Formulas on 65K+ Rows
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 Demand Planning Dilemma – Setting a Service Level
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.