SAP Scheduling & Shop Floor

Improving Scheduling & Shop Floor Control

Scheduling against constrained capacity resources enables you to maintain a balance between supply and demand and provides vision and information across the supply chain. Providing line of sight to realistic ship/availability/requirement dates for sales and procurement, helps improve decision making based on actual work center information.

Every occurrence of a miss to schedule attainment is an opportunity to learn about your processes, data quality, business rules and the human behavior that supports the rules. Utilizing SAP to plan and as a continuous improvement tool enables improved shop floor performance, enabling productivity and capacity improvements.

Accurate shop floor scheduling is the key that drives accurate material requirements to the rest of the supply chain to ensure that materials arrive on time and in full. Enabling less downtime and increasing throughput.

Optimizing SAP scheduling capabilities and shop floor control helps increase shop floor visibility which enables real-time inventory adjustments, provides material requirements, determines what resources are available for production, and confirms your processing status and individual capability. In addition, effective use of standard SAP capabilities integrates and streamlines schedule processing while supporting digital collaborations and capabilities.

To help you optimize these critical processes, Reveal’s oVo® methodology delivers deeper, enabling you to discover the best practices and SAP functionality that can be used to monitor and improve shop floor productivity.

Efficient Scheduling & Shop Floor

When supervisors are standing at any given work center, they need timely information and proactive answers about the current situation and production activities occurring across the shop floor to make changes, address bottlenecks and take advantage of available resources.

To improve efficiencies and improve service levels, it’s important be able to view work center capacity to determine if material is available and if the end product will be ready on time. When Scheduling & Shop Floor Control is operating effectively, stakeholders can easily obtain real-time updates from real-time shop floor activity, enabling better decision making, efficiencies and communication.

Challenges of Scheduling & Shop Floor

Unfortunately, many companies operate their production on outdated information typically found in spreadsheets. They move forward in a cumbersome manner: writing down information on paper and then entering it into a computer in batches either at shift-end or the following workday.

As a result, when they view their inventories through SAP, what they are really seeing is yesterday’s information. To access today’s information, they must either wait an entire day to receive the latest counts or manually count products on the shop floor.  All the while, they are forced to promise customers on-time delivery without knowing for certain that they can fulfill that promise.

The Reality

There are two common sense rules to ensure that Scheduling & Shop Floor productivity is being monitored and improved in the most optimal manner. Data needs to be entered in real-time and the shop floor must operate directly from SAP.

When Scheduling & Shop Floor is coalesced around one single source of truth, SAP, information is trustworthy, master data is leveraged and team members understand how to respond to exceptions, the result is realistic production, planning and control optimizing efficiencies and meeting customer demand.

Whether it’s optimizing supply chain performance or implementing additional SAP functionality, Reveal helps organizations improve internal business processes, educate users and deploy the smart use of SAP to achieve sustainable, tangible value. By challenging organizations to move away from being transactionally driven and move towards information-users that manage the process and apply knowledge, improvements in agility, service, cost, and inventory performance are achieved.