Helping You With Production Scheduling – New Webinars

Production-Scheduling.com is our blog to help you with production planning and scheduling in Excel.

As you look around the site, I hope our aim is clear: To offer ideas, tips and how-to resources for managing demand and matching it with supply.

This site is supported by consultants, chiefly Tony Rice and myself, Kien Leong who make a living helping professionals like you to build planning and scheduling systems.

We’ve found that the best way to build our business is to help people.  On the face of it, this might sound a little strange, coming from a consultant.

What it means is this:  Rather than trying to sell products and services through this website, we aim to help people by sharing our knowledge and experiences.

Managers and professionals from all over the world download our free tools, read our articles, watch our tutorials and ask us questions.  Anyone who writes to us gets an answer.  We try our best to be helpful and give value in reply to each and every email. Regardless of whether our correspondent buys a product or service.

The reason we do it this way is twofold:  Firstly, it is simply more enjoyable.  Helping people is a lot more fun than trying to sell them something.  Furthermore, it works.  Actually, it works a lot better than pushing a product with every interaction.

With this in mind, here is something that might be of interest to you.

Production Scheduling Webinars

You may notice a recent lull in the posting of articles.  This is because our time has been spent on projects, one-on-one with people.  It tends to work like this:  During some months we spend time preparing content for a wider audience;  other months are dedicated towards questions from individuals and work with clients.

The problem is that some months we only work with a small number of people.  And there are no recent resources going up on the site.

It also means that on some occasions, we find ourselves answering the same question time again.  It would be good if we could have a way to spread our ideas to a larger group, without having to prepare an article and downloadable examples each time.  Writing for this site involves a lot more than just stringing the words in a blog post together.  We usually offer an spreadsheet example and this takes time to prepare and test.

So, here is what we have got for you.  Each month, we will hold a webinar.  They will be free to attend, and will focus on a particular subject in operations planning and scheduling.

What You Can Get From Attending

The webinars will focus on a particular Excel-based tool for planning and scheduling.  They take the form of approximately 45 minutes of live presentation with screen-share and slides.  There will be another 45 minutes for Q&A.

You will have our collective expertise on the line for 1.5 hours, giving you the best ways to make Excel work as a dynamic planning and scheduling platform.

You will learn:

• Purpose– What each tool can and cannot do, set the right expectations
• The logic and assumptions we used to build it- this helps in customizing to your business
• Some powerful techniques used in its development- use them to build your own
• How to adapt it to your particular situation

You can ask questions, prior or during the webinar and we will do our best to answer them.  You can even supply some data (if you want to) and we will use this as an example.  All example tools will be available for download after the webinar.  The recording will not be available after the webinar, so if you’d like to participate, you need to attend live.

Here is What To Do Next

Attending the webinars is free.  All you need to do is signup, and then click the link that we give you to join the meeting on the day.

We are limiting the participation to 100 people on each webinar.  This helps us keep the questions manageable and let’s us focus on particular issues of interest to the group.

There are currently over 8000 members with Production-Scheduling.com.  We have all read the phrase “Signup now, supply is limited!” far too many times for it to be effective.  I’ll let you make your own conclusions about how popular it might be.

The registration of the webinars and the place to sign up will be sent out by email. 

— UPDATE —

The next webinar will be looking at the Fast Excel Development Template.  will be held at 4pm GMT (11am Eastern, 8am Pacific Time) on the 22nd November 2012.

We develop supply chain applications, including planning and scheduling, and the Fast Excel Development Template is the tool we use. With the Template you can build serious applications, and we would like to show you how.

This is for experienced Excel users only – the webinar is not for Excel beginners

During the webinar we will explain:

• Why so many companies use Excel for planning and scheduling
• The things they do wrong !
•  A structured and disciplined approach to developing systems in Excel
• The functions of the Template
• How to import data from your ERP system
• Analyze your data with PivotTables and PivotCharts
• Converting data from a matrix to a table
• Updating with just one click

If you are interested in joining the webinars, then I invite you to pre-register.  By doing this, you will be guaranteed to get a place.

This is all free with no commitment and you can unsubscribe from this list at any time.

I look forward to seeing you on the webinar call.