Controlling What You Can – How APS Enhances Production Efficiency

One of the biggest challenges in manufacturing is managing resources effectively. It’s hard enough when the landscape is predictable, but that has all changed in the past couple of months and weeks. The war in Ukraine, the Panama Canal concessions, and now President Trump’s global tariffs and trade negotiations have all added new challenges to many manufacturers. When faced with uncontrollable situations, Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) helps you control what you can, allowing you to better manage the ever-changing global environment and continue producing materials at optimum efficiency.

Overall, APS systems help manufacturers make the most of their assets by reducing waste, cutting costs, and ensuring timely production. Where? In three key areas: labor, machines and materials, all of which can be optimized to increase efficiency. How? In three targeted areas: finite capacity scheduling, constraint management, and production load balancing.

Target Area 1: Finite Capacity Scheduling (FCS)

Production schedules need to reflect reality and not wishful thinking, and APS systems factor in what your actual limits are in machines, labor, tools, and materials.  What are your available machine hours, your worker shifts and skills, your maintenance windows, and your tooling and material? By taking these constraints into account, APS can ensure that no work center is over or double-booked. Optimizing these constraints reduces bottlenecks, last-minute scheduling and overtime and maximizes throughput of your operations. Now that employees are no longer taxed on overtime, they’ll be excited to accrue as much overtime as possible. And let’s face it; that’s great for them but not for your bottom line.

APS also disseminates jobs evenly across available resources, keeping any one machine or production team from being overburdened. What does that mean for your production manager? Fewer idle machines and people for more consistent throughput. Whatever rules or objectives you need to prioritize, such as delivery deadlines, cost or machine changeover times, APS will schedule these priorities to help you achieve realistic throughput goals.

Finally, APS gives your business the agility and flexibility it needs when you do face a problem, such as a machine breaking down or a rush order coming in. It recalculates the schedule while still honoring capacity constraints; therefore, you have less firefighting on the shop floor. Ultimately, allowing APS to schedule your production line using FCS will result in fewer late orders, reduced work in progress (WIP), lower inventory and a reduction in labor costs.

2. Constraint Management

Whether it’s a slow or overloaded machine, a shortage of skilled labor, limited raw materials or even an outdated policy or procedure, APS was built for constraint management. An APS system does more than just avoid constraints; it uses them as the foundation for smarter scheduling. How? As Eli Goldratt might say, “Let’s determine where ‘Herbie the Bottleneck’ is.” APS systems analyze all available data (capacity, lead times, availability) and pinpoint bottlenecks…whether it’s a machine, an overloaded work center, or labor or material shortages… and tells you exactly what’s limiting production.

And unlike traditional planning that assumes “infinite capacity,” APS respects finite capacity across these constraints or bottlenecks. Think of it as playing an advanced game of Whack-a-mole, more appropriate than playing Whack-a-Herbie. When one bottleneck is fixed or managed, another one arises. APS systems are experts at winning this game.

3. Production Load Balancing

The final aspect of APS is balancing the workload and capacity across your production floor to ensure throughput meets demand and efficiency. Load balancing comes in various flavors on the shop floor. For example, you may place one dedicated product on a line that uses a slower machine (with a slow change over) versus placing multiple products/orders on a line that uses a newer high-speed machine (with quick change overs) to balance the load and capacity.

You have the option to balance load using either finite or infinite (unlimited) capacity. Using unlimited capacity will drive scheduling flexibility but could yield unrealistic workloads, excessive delays, and inefficiencies. But, using load balancing considering finite capacity constraints, you can schedule loads up to that capacity and reduce bottlenecks, ensuring realistic workloads and schedules while still meeting priorities.

In today’s environment, none of us have control over the war in Ukraine or what is going on with tariffs or global supplies. But we can use APS to play Whack-a-Mole and control Herbie and the Bottlenecks and optimize throughput to ensure on time deliveries in full. And the better we manage constraints and load balancing, the better equipped we will be to offer Available to Promise or Capable to Promise dates at order entry for customers. APS gives you confidence that you can meet and deliver any customer need, and garnering customer satisfaction leads to continued growth, no matter the political landscape.