Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS)

Advanced Planning & Scheduling software builds optimal, finite-capacity production schedules automatically and adjusts them in real time — replacing manual Excel planning.

Yes, APS works standalone with your ERP. Combined with MSF MES you get automatic real-time feedback from the floor, which makes schedules even more accurate.

Any make-to-order or high-mix production: machinery, automotive parts, injection moulding, glass, food, electronics and more — see our case studies.

Routings with operation times that match what the machines actually do, work centre calendars and shift patterns, and the constraints you genuinely plan against: tooling, operator skills, material availability. The usual weak point is routing standards set years ago for costing. If a run time carries an allowance nobody remembers, the schedule inherits that error everywhere. Audit a sample of standards against recorded cycle times before go-live.

Only as current as the last confirmation booked in your ERP, or the last feedback from MES if you run one. APS plans against orders, routings and capacity, so it does not need machine or PLC data to work at all. What connectivity buys is latency: a breakdown at nine o'clock reaches the plan when somebody types it in, and until then you are sequencing against a floor that has already moved on.

No, and buying it to remove the role is how these projects fail. APS takes over the sequencing and the recalculation; it does not know that one customer tolerates a day's lateness and another does not, or that a given operator should not run a given job this week. The planner's work shifts from building the schedule to maintaining the constraints and judging the exceptions the optimiser flags.

The optimiser evaluates large numbers of sequence combinations and minimises total setup, so it groups jobs that run well together instead of merely ordering them by due date. How finely it separates one changeover from another depends on how setup is modelled in your routings, so put your own colour, material or tool-group cases in front of it during the POC. Without measured transition times, coarse groupings still beat a flat setup allowance.

The plan degrades into another report, and no optimiser fixes that. Two causes are usual: schedules that were never feasible because a constraint was left out of the model, and a re-plan cadence that changes the sequence faster than the floor can react. Pin or lock the near-term operations on the Gantt so the published list stops churning, and watch what planners lock by hand, because each one names a missing constraint.

Steady state is a short daily review of the published plan plus handling the exceptions the optimiser flags. Budget considerably more in the first months, when the work is data rather than sequencing: correcting routings, maintaining calendars, and adding the constraints the schedule exposes by breaking. Master data upkeep never ends, because a new machine, tool or skill that is missing from the model is a constraint the optimiser will happily violate.

MRP works out what to make and buy and when, against fixed lead times and infinite capacity. APS works out whether that can actually be produced in that order on the resources you own, in the shifts you actually staff. The two coexist: MRP stays the source of demand and material requirements, and APS takes those orders and returns dates that finite capacity supports. Replacing MRP is not the intent.