In this fast changing world nowadays, if manufacturing companies want to remain competitive, they need to develop new products more frequently to meet a fast changing market place. This often means that the company must be able to cope with making a greater number of products since older products take longer to ‘die’ than new ones are ‘born’. The range of products then will increase but companies cannot afford to keep high levels of inventory of all their products in order to offer ‘ex-stock’ delivery.

In order to meet deliveries, batch sizes must be smaller and manufacturing lead times shorter. In effect companies are moving away from make-to-stock and towards make-to-order production mode.

All of these pressures make short term scheduling a key issue for companies since the correct sequencing of batches and fast feedback of problems are essential to achieving high levels of efficiency and low cost of production while maintaining on-time delivery.

Preactor, one of most flexible advanced planning and scheduling software tools in the world, allows users to generate production schedules based on the characteristics of the products and the capacity all the resources in a nick of time. As a result, users not only can evaluate different schedules before the final decision is made, the schedule can be updated more frequently when the status of orders and resources are revised so that personnel from different departments (e.g. shop floor, management, sales) can make proper adjustments on their parts.

Based on the complex of the production schedules, Preactor provides different versions so that manufacturing companies will only need to invest on what they need