To keep up with the rapid rate of innovation in the global manufacturing industry, a growing number of companies are turning to smart manufacturing with advanced planning and scheduling programs. According to Gartner, nearly 80% of manufacturers are currently investing in their plants’ digital transformations to keep up with changes in the market.
The digital ecosystems these businesses are investing in rely on a complex network of technologies. To implement, maintain, and integrate new planning & scheduling programs with existing tools, your IT department will be one of your most important resources. In many of the organizations we work with, the IT team is instrumental in both selecting the best tools to implement and keeping all technology systems up and running.
As your business considers which digital investments you’ll make in the coming year and beyond, there are several areas where you’ll want to consult IT for their input. Keep reading to discover IT’s role in manufacturing planning and scheduling, as well as the features they’ll appreciate the most when you select a new tool.
Integrating New Tools with Existing Programs
When evaluating and selecting a planning and scheduling software solution (or any manufacturing software solution, for that matter), your IT team will likely advise you to select programs that interact and integrate with each other. There are several reasons your site will find this beneficial. Using integrated tools not only makes it easier for IT to manage your technology systems, but it also makes your entire site more efficient. Using technologies that connect and communicate removes data siloes within the site, making critical information more accessible across departments and providing possibilities to identify plant improvements.
VirtECS, our advanced planning and scheduling solution, offers several features that make it easier for your IT team to integrate the tool into your existing system. Our customers have successfully and seamlessly completed several third-party integrations with OSI Pi, SAP, and other manufacturing technologies. With our decades of experience implementing VirtECS into manufacturing environments, our experts can also provide proven recommendations on how to best build an intuitive system architecture. Plus, if your IT team is busy with other site projects, our team can implement VirtECS into your plant ourselves, or simply offer additional support as needed.
Finding Scalable Solutions
When working with our customers, we’ve often observed that when one manufacturing site finds an effective tool, the business will want to quickly implement the same program at their other plants to reap the most value. For that reason, your IT department may be looking for software that can be easily scaled across the company. Utilizing scalable tools simplifies many aspects of your company’s technology framework by reducing costs associated with the tool, streamlining training and communication, and making it easier for the business to grow.
If your company is looking for scalable software, highly customized solutions can be too time-consuming to be practical for the IT team. A tool like VirtECS can provide all the planning and scheduling features you’ll need under one platform, so IT won’t need to build a custom system themselves or adapt other technology to fit your industry. In addition, our VirtECS experts can provide training to your planning and scheduling team, so IT leaders won’t need to use their valuable time becoming experts on the tool and training staff themselves.
Ensuring Systems Are Secure
One of IT’s biggest priorities and concerns is protecting your business’ confidential information. For any software you add to your manufacturing plant, it will be crucial to ensure that it does not pose cybersecurity risks. If the planning and scheduling tool you select opens your organization up to cyberattacks, IT will need to add security barriers to the software and initiate backups to prevent losing valuable data. The manufacturing industry experiences more cyberattacks than any other industry, and such invasions can cause costly delays and revenue loss.
To ease IT’s security concerns, VirtECS offers a self-hosted software option to limit the risks often associated with a cloud-based solution. Our self-hosted option allows your organization to retain complete control over the data contained in VirtECS, which minimizes hackers’ ability to access your information. This feature has helped VirtECS become a trusted tool for customers even in industries with strict data privacy regulations, such as healthcare and biotechnology.
Adding New Capabilities
As market conditions and industry trends continue to fluctuate, your manufacturing plant may find that your planning and scheduling software needs updating to reflect these changes. In these situations, your IT department will be incredibly helpful in installing software updates, revising the software’s framework to mirror changes in your plant, or coordinating with your software provider to request additional capabilities.
After working with manufacturing businesses for decades, our team is used to making adjustments to VirtECS as the industry advances and technologies change. Some experts refer to this process as “change management,” which simply means creating a manufacturing environment that can effectively respond to change while maintaining optimized operations. One of VirtECS’ best features is that our planning and scheduling system is based on a model of each unique plant, which can be quickly and continually changed to reflect new scenarios or test possible improvements. Our experts can train your team on how to use the VirtECS plant model to facilitate change management and provide expertise on best practices keep processes optimized while responding to change. If you’re interested in learning more about how VirtECS can help your IT team to improve planning and scheduling processes without disrupting your site’s current software systems, fill out a short form and one of our experts will reach out to learn more about your site’s unique needs.
