Microsoft Excel® has been a ubiquitous tool in planning and scheduling for many years. Excel is easy to learn, flexible, and typically already available as a corporate tool, making it a simple solution for many companies.
However, Excel also requires the user to manually input every change and check every constraint. Planners and schedulers that rely exclusively on Excel find that developing detailed plans and schedules can be tedious and time consuming, especially when frequent updates need to be made to reflect plant floor conditions. It’s incredibly easy to make costly mistakes using Excel – in fact, studies indicate nearly 90% of all spreadsheets contain at least one error. Excel also does not support standardization, so when the expert on a local tool leaves, it can be very difficult for others to maintain the existing sheet.
With many executives realizing the need for a more advanced capability to fit their unique planning and scheduling demands, some have started to look for suitable alternatives. Recently, the Wall Street Journal published an article exploring why executives at companies like Hackett Group, Inc. and Pure Cycle Corp. are looking for solutions to minimize their reliance on Excel.
Our advanced planning and scheduling tool, VirtECS, can both overcome Excel’s weaknesses as an alternative or work side-by-side with it as a helpful addition. VirtECS integrates well with Excel and can automatically import needed data that has been collected or maintained in Excel. This prevents data entry mistakes so that planners and schedulers can transition to VirtECS completely or leverage both tools. With VirtECS, you can reduce the amount of time spent optimizing your schedule, while also reducing costs and increasing revenue at the same time.
How Does VirtECS Compare to and Complement Excel?
When customers first adopt VirtECS, they quickly notice a reduction in the time required to develop their plant schedule. Manual changes that used to take hours to input in Excel are now performed automatically, allowing your schedule to respond to developing conditions within minutes. You can track all changes easily within VirtECS, making your company’s processes streamlined and more efficient.
VirtECS can also act as a complement to Excel by providing high-powered automation, mathematics, and data analysis. Because some of our customers still choose to leverage Excel in addition to VirtECS, we’ve also designed our tool to export all data and reports into a format compatible with Excel. Having data that works within both programs allows our customers to get the most use out of all their tools.
Most importantly, VirtECS is capable of searching over many possible schedules and will always select the best, most optimal option. When using Excel, typically only one or a few schedules are examined, resulting in higher costs or lower throughput. The superior schedules produced by VirtECS translate directly to the bottom line. VirtECS projects typically pay for themselves within months of operation through cost reduction and increase in production and resource utilization.
In addition to our advanced planning and scheduling tool, our customers also utilize VirtECS Symphony to give everyone at the plant access to the optimized schedule. VirtECS Symphony is a web-based module that promotes remote collaboration, allowing a more efficient flow of communication between shop floor execution and scheduling.
We would love to tell you more about why VirtECS is an ideal replacement or complement for Excel. To schedule a phone call or demonstration of VirtECS, please fill out our form here.
