Company Background

Mr. Conti got tired of using CRP and reverted to using Excel to simulate and evaluate production schedules. His reasons for dropping CRP were the following:

- CRP is driven by a weak objective which is just to simulate "overload" and "underload" situations of different planning scenarios;

- CRP is using a limited methodology which is "backward or forward scheduling" based on leadtimes without consideration of the finite capacities of plant resources;

- In CRP, the burden of making a doable schedule through cumbersome and time-consuming manual adjustments of workloads and capacities is on the production scheduler, thus, making his job very difficult;

- CRP assumes that "queue times" are constants, while they are really variables;

- CRP generates so many reports that are difficult to relate making their analyses a real nightmare to the production scheduler;

- Poor quality of CRP results (quantities and dates of production orders) means poor quality of MRP results (quantities and dates of production orders for sub-assemblies and purchase orders for materials).

The poor quality of CRP and MRP outputs seriously impairs the overall performance of the entire ERP System.

Having had personal experience with the problems in capacity management and production scheduling using two popular software packages and having learned that the three leading ERP packages in the market today have the same inherent weaknesses (as enumerated in the previous page), Mr. Conti decided to look at the capacity management and production scheduling problem more closely.

He then formulated a model and developed a solution algorithm for capacity management and production scheduling which eliminated the above-listed weaknesses to offer a totally effective solution to the generally complex capacity management and production scheduling problem.

The first version of the Capacity Scheduling System was completed in March, 2011. Not surprisingly, due to its many advanced features and functions, impressive inquiries and reports, and user-friendliness, the Capacity Scheduling System got very positive feedbacks when Mr. Conti presented and demonstrated it to manufacturing managers and materials managers who attended the two seminars, namely:

- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

- Quantitative Techniques for Manufacturing and Distribution

held at the National Engineering Center of the University of the Philippines in April and May, 2011.