After Oracle’s acquisition of JD Edwards in 2006, Oracle has been promoting the best-in-class Production Scheduling (PS) software for all the obvious reasons. While more and more customers are adopting Oracle Production Scheduling to remove bottlenecks and improve performance on the shop floor, some manufacturing companies are still wondering why they should switch from Oracle’s Old Manufacturing Scheduling to Production Scheduling?

Here are the main reasons:

· Oracle PS is a versatile application that can be stand-alone or integrated with Manufacturing Planning and Execution Systems as opposed to Manufacturing Scheduling which mainly works in conjunction with the manufacturing execution system – Work in Process (WIP). With Production Scheduling’s close loop integration with Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP), shop floor jobs can be best scheduled to both optimize resource planning and maximize service levels.

· Oracle PS with its powerful Key Performance Indicators (KPI) can be used as a tool to ensure that the scheduling scenario is meeting the corporate end objectives. Comparison of different schedule scenarios are instantly displayed in the Oracle Production Scheduling KPIs with Service Level, Inventory, Resource and Manufacturing utilization details. This makes decision analysis rather effortless. Many savvy schedulers using Oracle Manufacturing Scheduling had long wished for such powerful functionality.

· Oracle Production Scheduling can automatically detect resource floating bottlenecks as they move within a schedule. This understanding helps PS Solver deploy the most appropriate

Scheduling strategy to maximize the throughput and optimize the resource utilization.

On the other hand, resolving the bottleneck required a lot of constant tuning of the rules in the older Oracle Manufacturing Scheduling.

· Production Scheduling provides a number of views which can provide users with powerful analysis to support their decision making. Some of these views and user interfaces are:

o Production Pegging (Supply/Demand pegging with easy to drill down alert and root causes)

o Resource and Operations Gantt

o Resource and Item Graph

o Resource Gantt and Multi-Capacity Resource Graph

o Operations Editor and Graphical Routings

o Change over Editor

· Performance: Oracle PS uses smarter technology for constraint directed search which achieves the advantages of constraint-based scheduling with much better performance over traditional tools like Oracle Manufacturing Scheduling. This is another reason Production Scheduling becomes a tool of choice when production volume or production constraints are higher.

· Oracle PS is much simpler to setup yet delivers powerful scheduling strategies to optimize production without much trial and error. This reduces the total cost of ownership.

CONCLUSION

Oracle Production Scheduling is truly the best of breed next generation software which provides huge advantages over Oracle’s past Manufacturing scheduling tool. There are a number of additional PS capabilities (not covered in this short blog) that if implemented well, can make scheduling really productive.