Visual Planner 

Macola Integrated Production Planning & Scheduling

Because Visual Planner is the only production planning and scheduling tool that is completely integrated into Macola Progression and ES, it can provide Exact customers with features that are simply not available in other packages. With Visual Planner it is easy to interrogate live Exact data without the need to ever go into Exact. Extensive drill-down features provide you with instant access to information that will help you to make better planning decisions. Features like these:           

Graphical Planning Board:

Lets your clearly see the available working time in each work centre and the orders already scheduled. The orders that you need to schedule appear in a spreadsheet style list that you can sort any way you wish. Simple drag and drop each order when you wish to schedule it, or let automatic scheduler do it for you. This will save Schedulers so much time and release them to manage activities on the shop floor.

Trial Kitting:

This feature allows you to see all the components required for any group of orders that are  selected. Shortages are highlighted and you can drill down to see actual allocations, open purchase orders with two mouse clicks. Trial Kitting will help you identify available stock in one or multiple stocking locations. All of this will help them to confirm that all the components needed are available before any orders are released. If the materials aren’t available you can quickly rearrange production to keep things running smoothly or contact the purchasing department to expedite the materials required so that they can complete the order in time for delivery to the customer. Trial Kitting data can be sorted, grouped, filtered and exported to excel or simply printed.   

Bill of Material:

Visual Planner provides you with the ability to drill down into the live captured BOM data that is stored in Macola from the Graphical Planning Screen.

Production Order Properties:

Order Properties drill down provides real-time information on the item location, stocking policy, customer orders, manufacturing and production reporting all from one screen. Your Schedulers will never need to look at a Macola screen again!

Shift/Calendar Maintenance:

The limitations that exist in Macola’s Shop Calendar are now a thing of the past. With Visual Planner you can quickly create and maintain calendars that are based on real operational times.  With easy to use templates, you can define shifts (start time lunch time and end time) and apply them to one or many work centers. Shift changes can also be created and applied to your working calendar to represent things like double shifts, machine down time, reduced head count and much more. By doing so, a visual representation of available capacity and resources within a chosen planning period is clearly visible on the graphical planning board.  

What If Orders:

Create these orders on the fly, so when a customer wants to place an order with you, you can quickly establish whether you have the capacity, stock and resources to complete the order by the customers due date. Once you are satisfied you have the capacity and stock all you need to do is generate a real shop or pop order to take up that capacity in your plan.

Capacity Charts & Management Dashboards:

Visual Planner provides short and long term capacity planning charts along with Management Dashboards providing you with all the information you need to meet your key performance targets.