Schedlyzer Lite
Powerful Software for Production Scheduling
Nowadays, many industries are engaged in order-driven, high-variety, discrete production where multiple work orders are simultaneously processed using limited resources. Any job shop engaged in high-mix, low-volume (HMLV) production usually belongs to this class of industries. Management of such production is a difficult task for many job shops. It is a real challenge for those shops to efficiently handle rush orders as well as changes in order priorities and get maximum throughput and on-time delivery using limited resources. As mentioned in our article on scientific management of job shop production, powerful scheduling software not only create high quality schedules but also offer intelligent decision support for production management by facilitating fast and extensive what-if analysis of workflow.
However, being small in size and revenue, many job shops cannot afford a lot of money for such software. We are offering a powerful, low-cost scheduling tool, Schedlyzer Lite, for order-driven production units to meet this need. A brief YouTube video of Schedlyzer Lite without details is available on our home page.
Schedlyzer Lite is created from our main scheduling software tool Schedlyzer by removing some features which are not essential for generating high-quality schedules. The primary purpose of this creation is to drastically reduce the price of our scheduling software to an affordable level for a vast majority of job shops. To generate a high-quality schedule, Schedlyzer Lite is almost as powerful as Schedlyzer. It is based on a versatile scheduling paradigm and advanced scheduling algorithms and is an outcome of several years of research and practical experience in scheduling. For many job shops, this low-cost tool can still give a better schedule than any other commercial job shop scheduling software. In a single exercise, it can schedule up to 25,000 production operations subject to all major constraints in production.
Schedlyzer Lite with Excel Interface
Excel is the most widely used tool for production scheduling even among job shops. In many industries, schedulers import the data needed for scheduling from an ERP/MRP system to Excel or create it in Excel. They apply some logic to the data for generating a corresponding schedule. Using an Excel interface, Schedlyzer Lite reads input data from an Excel file and generates a much better schedule than the schedules generated within Excel. It enables schedulers to take full advantage of the power and convenience of Excel along with our rigorous scheduling logic and interactive graphic features. People who currently depend on production schedules in Excel can find a lot of practical value in Schedlyzer Lite.
Schedlyzer Lite is beyond the capability for rational timing of operations with proper resource assignment. It facilitates fast and extensive what-if analysis of schedules and proactive capacity planning. It also helps achieve the best shop performance from limited resources. While generating a meaningful schedule almost instantaneously, the tool also helps find quick, right answers to many important questions such as:
- How to expedite an urgent job without drastically affecting completion times of other jobs?
- How does a change in job priority (or job due date) affect workflow and completion time of every job?
- How does a breakdown of a busy machine affect workflow and completion times of jobs?
- How does the absence or overtime of a worker affect workflow and completion times of jobs?
- How does an extra shift with some machines and workers reduce WIP and lead times and improve on-time delivery and throughput?
- How does material delay for a job affect the entire production schedule?
- How to do proactive capacity planning for reducing lead times and improving on-time delivery?
- When to start each job based on current workload and resource capacities for minimal WIP and lead times?
- How to manage a hot job with minimal damage to the existing production schedule?
- Which operations can be outsourced, if possible, for achieving maximum shop throughput?
Schedlyzer Lite is developed for neither real-time job tracking on shop floor nor real-time scheduling although it can be configured to do both if real-time job progress is recorded by some other system. This software is very appropriate when people look for a powerful, low-cost scheduling tool with intelligent decision support (for production management) rather than a schedule information system. Schedlyzer Lite is also very useful for resource-constrained, multi-project scheduling in production environment and resource-constrained workload scheduling in general.
Practical utility of a scheduling tool can be properly evaluated for any specific production unit by using it with real data for some days. For this reason, we freely offer duly configured, fully functional, 60-day trial copy of Schedlyzer Lite. Contact us for a free trial copy. Before giving the free trial copy, we would first present a live web demo of Schedlyzer Lite and configure the copy as required for your system. We would also offer you free help during trial runs.