Advance Planning & Scheduling System

The TROPOS Planners Workbench provides a fast, effective alternative to manual planning boards or traditional block-scheduling procedures that ignore finishing and transportation. It is a state of the art advanced scheduling system capable of rapid response in complex situations. It is based on Greycon’s S-Plan Advanced Planning and Scheduling tool, and can be implemented stand-alone or fully integrated with TROPOS.

When implemented with TROPOS, the Planners Workbench supports very sophisticated scheduling algorithms that provide Available to Promise (ATM) responses at order entry, in addition to supporting the production planning and management processes.

The production scheduling optimisation component can help you schedule production in a manner consistent with your business goals.

Key functionality

• Optimisation capability including Softblock
• Available to promise, even across the Internet
• Block scheduling
• Constraint-based scheduling
• Selection of alternate resources based on efficiencies to meet expected time constraints
• Oven scheduling
• Scheduling basd on labour and tool availability
• Material requirement planning
• Load & transportation mode planning

Unique Features

A series of unique features were developed for industries manufacturing dimensional products – reel, coil, web, sheet, etc. The TROPOS Planners Workbench schedules are based on attributes and manage products appearing in a large number of combinations of physical sizes and specifications. It manages the many-to-many relationships between orders and physical entities, while using the many units of measure that are part of the product at each step of the manufacturing process.

These unique features make the TROPOS Planners Workbench particularly well-suited for industries including:

• Paper
• Converting
• Printing
• Packaging
• Textile
• Metal

Pre-configured Interfaces

The TROPOS Planners Workbench is designed to plug-in to your manufacturing environment. The interface data server is a set of pre-configured interface messages and APIs designed to integrate with your ERP, SCM, and MES applications (order, schedule, production, material, and references).

The interface engine uses MSMQ or alternately IBM MQ Series messaging engines. The TROPOS Planners Workbench ATP engine can be launched directly from an order-entry system.

User Interface

• True Windows user interface
• User-defined units of measure
• Customisable terminology & language support, including Finnish, French, German, Portugese, Spanish & Swedish
• Context-sensitive on-line help and professional manual

Functionality

• Multi-site capability
• User defined scheduling rules
• Drag and drop adjustments to the schedule
• Multiple tentative plans with service level and cost comparisons
• Can handle large data sets (e.g. more than 20,000 orders, more than 200 workcentres)
• Arbitrarily complex shift patterns
• Scheduling engine has documented API and the user may write optimisation scheduling rules packaged as a dynamic link library
• Formula-based production and waste rates
• Parallel workcentres with automatic sub-contracting
• Materials constraints with automatic generation of production orders for materials produced in-house
• Tool constraints definable at the workcentre, product and order level
• Skill constraints definable at the workcentre, product and order level
• Multi-user capability with real-time updates
• Intelligent use of semi-finished stock

Industry-Specific Components

• Paper machine optimisation/softblock
• Trim Optimisation
• Many-to-many relationships between physical entities and logical orders – integrates with X-Trim
• Roll stock optimisation
• Dynamic Beam Optimisation/loom scheduling
• Annealing furnace batch optimisation
• Property transformation

Internet capabilities

• Access order status
• Check delivery date
• Place a reservation order
• Place an order
• Launch ATP promise from external system

Integration with other systems

• Standard integration with other TROPOS modules
• Customisable import and export functions
• Use of ODBC technology for interfacing and ability to mix database sources
• Interfaces to industry-specific applications
• Documented API for available-to-promise enquiries
• Documented API for order status enquiries
• Availability of MSMQ-based or IBM MQ Series messaging layer

Platform

• Windows 98/2000 and Windows NT 4.0
• Windows Terminal Server (Hydra) compatibility
• Database independent, including Oracle, SQL Server
• 32-bit architecture

Reporting

Programmable reports with popular third party report writer; reports can be exported in various popular formats (Lotus, word, Excel, HTML, etc.) & can be sent by e-mail

Support

• Hot line support
• More than 120 installations world-wide
• User Group & Newsletter