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.
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.
Is MRP Your Business Constraint?
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:..
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.
This is an information site to help you build planning and scheduling systems with spreadsheets. Here you will find tutorials, templates and downloads that can be used to create advanced planning and scheduling system using Microsoft Excel.