" sl-ect has helped us to develop our planning and stock systems. They implemented and support our Preactor system and its interface with Sage. What would happen if someone took away Preactor? For a start we would have to go back to holding high buffer stocks because purchasing would not have an accurate plan to work to.
Preactor ensures that we have a valid sequence of running the related works orders, and outputs "Work-To" lists for each resource.
This is just one part of the advantages of having full visibility of the plan.
Previously we just had a list of jobs, now we have a colour coded Gantt chart view that is so easy to use when reacting to changes in the production environment. In other situations we can look ahead and spot potential problems, so we can actually be proactive instead of reactive.
Shop-floor has visibility of the plan and they trust it because they know from experience that it works.
Our Production Director knows that he can make decisions based on the capacity graphs because nothing is planned in the past, so the peaks and troughs in loading really are likely to happen in the weeks shown! This is vital because we frequently use temporary production and warehouse staff.
And visibility for UPL means we can give visibility to our customers at the push of a button. We send a production schedule directly to some customers, for 2 reasons. Obviously they want to see when the finished goods will be supplied, but many also provide us with their own packaging materials and so they use the start date of jobs as a schedule for delivering the packaging to us.
Our Maintenance department also use the planning reports - for instance they look for periods where they will be less involved with machine setups, and instead plan maintenance work into those time slots.
And we have been able to achieve all of this without the Routings and WIP modules, which were too complicated for what we needed."
Steve Snelson - Planning & Warehouse Manager
Universal Products Ltd
Full Case Study: UPL & Preactor