If your manufacturing planning and scheduling systems still depend heavily on manual processes, you’re not alone. Research from Edge Research has shown 50% of manufacturing companies still rely on manual efforts to plan and monitor their supply chain activities.
Rather than using employees’ time and energy on complicated manual calculations, consider allowing automated processes to handle these equations to give your planning and scheduling department more time to spend on valuable supervision. Using software for these processes can help relieve many of the pain points that every manufacturer deals with. We’ll give some examples of how reducing manual scheduling calculations can benefit your manufacturing business below.
Account for Additional Factors
From a logistics standpoint, scheduling software programs can factor in many more constraints to an equation than a manual process realistically could. When these constraints affect each other, as they so often do, the complexity continues to grow exponentially. Scheduling software can take in detailed data about equipment, labor, materials, and other plant constraints, while still generating a viable schedule in a fraction of the time a manual process would require. With this added accountability within the system, manufacturing schedules will become more accurate. When every detail is accounted for and included in the scheduling process, you’ll feel confident that your plant is always working from the most optimized schedule possible.
Minimize Errors
In any calculation that is performed manually, there is always a risk of human error. Out of every 100 steps completed, a human will make about 10 mistakes on average, according to the Institute for Robotic Process Automation. Because planning and scheduling processes are so interconnected, even just one mistake made along the way can have a significant ripple effect. When errors are made in production, the plant must perform more re-runs, which result in decreased efficiency and higher costs. However, when these complicated calculations are completed with software, accidental errors are all but eliminated. The money and time your plant would usually spend fixing mistakes can instead be invested into continuous improvements.
Free Up Employees’ Time
Speaking of saving time, when software is used to automatically create schedules, your planners and schedulers can put the hours they spent on manual calculations to more constructive use. The data input process becomes much more streamlined, freeing up their time for more supervision and output analysis. This is not only more beneficial for the plant itself, but it is also more rewarding work for employees. According to data from Hubspot, 22% of an employee’s time is spent on repetitive tasks, such as manual calculations. Spending a long period of time performing repetitive and monotonous tasks can have a negative effect on employees’ work performance, as well as their overall satisfaction at work. When schedules are created through software, employees are able to devote more time to learning new areas the business, finding areas of improvement and better applying their knowledge to the company.
VirtECS is an advanced manufacturing planning and scheduling software tool that can reduce the need for manual calculations. Our software handles data integration to generate a plant schedule that accounts for current and future demands, plant equipment, current inventory levels, and process flow. VirtECS has been implemented at leading companies in chemical, consumer products, electronics, food and beverage, and pharmaceutical industries. If you’re interested in learning more about VirtECS and the ways it can optimize your plant’s production, please download on our guide here.
