Advanced planning and finite capacity scheduling accurately model manufacturing capacity of your factory. Your supply of capacity is based on shop calendars, holidays, work centers, labor, employees, tooling, floor space and any other resource which can constrain your production.  Job shops scheduling can be used for made to order and engineer to order but also can be used in production lines.  Many shops also need to express labor skill cross-qualifications, and tooling preferences to accurately define true "shop capacity".

Advanced planning and scheduling (APS) adds the ability to schedule material and 3rd part processes to the scheduling process. This includes recognition of inventory, material pegged to production orders, open purchase orders, bills of material, and sales orders.

The goals of scheduling is to provide accurate and unparalleled scheduling integrating material planning and capacity planning, Delivering accurate estimates and ease of use tracking with bar coding or MIE Kiosk terminal to update the scheduling system is a requirement.   These elements help you achieve accurate visibility of order start and finish with ample time to take corrective action to prevent late deliveries and material stock-outs.  MIE Trak scheduling gives the following abilities to accomplish these goals:

• model production capacity accurately;
• create schedules consistent with your shop's true capacity;
• increase schedule visibility across sales, engineering, purchasing, production, shipping and customer service.
• increase plant throughput by least 5-10% with the same labor giving profit gains of 8-12% for the company;
• reduce schedule conflicts, overtime, outsourcing, emergency freight, crisis expediting; and
• increase your competitiveness by improving your on-time performance.

Precision Scheduling reduces planning effort, because schedules become more stable once bottlenecks and major crisis points are anticipated and solved before they even become headaches.  Because short-range schedules accurately consider a greater number of constraints, production flows more smoothly, and issued inventory is tightly coupled to actual production.

MIE Traks advanced planning and scheduling  (APS) extends elementary finite scheduling systems by recognizing additional constraints. Recognizing constraints is an important factor to deliver a quality schedule which a shop could move parts through the plant.  Imagine having your shop follow a detailed schedule over the next 72 hours where the schedule has accurately allowed not only for just machine capacity, but has also considered labor attendance (including vacations), labor skills, tooling, floor-space, assembly sequences, and especially raw material availability.

MIE Trak can recognize on-hand inventory materials, open purchase orders, and planned allocations of material to work orders or shop production lots. Inventory levels move up and down across future scheduled days, recognizing every material receipt and issue event.  The material planner's post-schedule analysis starts right from a list of simulated future net requirements. One of the key areas to improve the shop schedule is the ability to make adjustments and globally reschedule the shop to see the net changes.

Our latest product, MIE Trak continues to push the state of the art.  Its main advantages include:

• Fast scheduling
• Supports Labor, Labor Groups
• Supports Assembly-Subassembly Synchronization
• Supports Multi-Cell and Multi-Plant manufacturing environments.
• Exact setup matching option based on part, part-family, color or other user-defined traits per operation.
• Advanced Sequence Matching, with multiple trait families, and prioritization within each family.
• Advanced Schedule White Board, showing both work station task time blocks and the matching resource assignments
• Multiple Feature/Price Levels to best serve small to mid-size manufacturing companies.
• Fully integrated Job Quote module, Capable to Promise visibility of achievable due-date quotes for customers.
• Many standard reports which can be customized
• What-If Comparisons, Un-used Capacity, Alternate Schedule Scores
• Assign work to specific employees
• 6 Methods of global scheduling from finite forward to infinite backwards.

MIE Traks job shop scheduling system fully supports the philosophy of lean manufacturing by recognizing that lean manufacturing covers a wide range of disciplines.  MIE Trak complements Lean Philosophy.  MIE Trak recognizes links between inventory, work centers and cells.   MIE Trak provides the  detailed scheduling that Lean Manufacturing needs especially to manage variable demand value-streams. MIE Trak also supports Just-in-Time scheduling, and 'order-less' batch-scheduling for repetitive make-to-stock companies.  MIE Trak is a strong mixed-mode scheduling system, used extensively in  job-shops, engineer-to-order and assemble to order shops, and can also be applied in repetitive make-to-stock shops which are partially 'make-to-order'.

Jobs Sharing Same Resource (Nesting)

Batch Processing is a easy to use in MIE Trak.  Batch processing is used in MIE Trak how a nesting system works.  Nesting is when you place more then 1 job on the same machine at the same time in order to optimize setup, run, and material utilization.  Flexible Machining Systems using the nesting package allows multiple work orders to share the capacity of a single resouce, to satisfy the minimum daily shipments needed for multiple clients. MIE Trak supports this requirement of Flexible Machining Systems (FMS).

MIE Trak is a leading provider of prodution control software for the entire manufacturing sector.  Incorporating Fabrication Software, sheet metal software, machine shop software, ERP software, manufacturing software systems, estimating softwre, maintenance software, CMMS software, job tracking software, scheduling software, management software and job shop software.

For Finite Capacity Scheduling, typical resource capacity limits include the following:

• Working calendars express working days of the week, shift lengths, and the starting time of each shift.  Holidays and other non-working days are also expressed in each calendar.
• Work Centers defined as groups of like work-stations.  Work Centers include machines, equipment and work stations, but can also be used to model generic labor pools.
• Secondary Resource constraints apply to labor, equipment, floor space, consumables.  Labor can also be designated by shift, also by qualified skills for a given resource group. This concept is extended to tool 'qualifications' to recognize subsets of tools of varying size, capabilities or power.

MIE Trak helps schedulers build an accurate model of your capacity demands and the resource limits in your shop.  By "accurate" we mean  shop conditions which include, but are not necessarily limited to the following examples:

• Alternate routings: only specific subsets of your work stations, tools or operators are qualified to perform certain operations.
• Operations have both a fixed setup/teardown time as well as a quantity based time per-unit for processing time.
• Multiple resource constraints demanded by the same operation such as labor, tools, floor space, water, power, lubricants, raw materials, etc.
• Easy modeling of overlapping tasks to maximize 'Just-in-Time', Parallel, From-Start, and activity branches inside each work order.
• Assembly links between work orders to correctly model assembly manufacturing
• Recognition of a variable crew size per operation.
• Recognition that a single operator can simultaneously be tending N number of machines.
• MIE Kiosk (White Board, Kiosk) Schedule Board which shows both machines and assigned labor and tooling resources per task
• Explicitly splitting operations across multiple work stations of the work center to saturate available capacity.
• Resource seized and held across a series of operations, such as a special vice, cart, tool or even the same manager or operator set.

MIE Solutions, Inc. has been selling, consulting and creating software for finite and infinite capacity based scheduling systems for 20 years.  MIE Trak began as a DOS PC based system and worked its way up through the years to a full easy to use windows based software package.   MIE Solutions specialized in quoting, estimating, order entry, work orders, scheduling, purchasing, invoicing, job tracking, data collection to improve manufacturing on-time performance.

MIE Trak has been applied successfully in discrete, repetitive, process, engineer to order and assemble to order manufacturing.

MIE Trak also offers a full range of services including:

• analysis of situation,
• modeling,
• training,
• customization,
• implementation support, and
• measurement of benefits.

Our primary focus is scheduling a job shop which can actually be used by the shop floor.   So many scheduling systems do not take into consideration changes and job collection during the scheduling process.   Schedules in a job shop can change hourly and management needs to make the appropriate adjustments as quickly as possible.

MIE Trak supports your scheduling needs so please visit us at

http://www.mie-solutions.com for more information