If your
company is on the fast track to success in today’s global marketplace, you may
be trying to achieve goals within a leaner work environment. Setting deadlines
and meeting scheduling goals may be crucial in your customer development
database. Increasing productivity extends beyond the production floor in today’s
manufacturing arena. Support areas such as sales, marketing, planning and
scheduling are learning about efficiency and working to develop a more reliable
system of team oriented supported networking.
For help
with your marketing needs, collaborative resource scheduling software may be worth considering. Customers require definitive time frames with the implementation of daily or weekly verification for confirmation of impending deadlines for
shipments. You have to take into account that your customers also have
customers. It is this intricate networking that a scheduling software package
will help you to master with professional ease. As your customer load
increases, demands for on time delivery can become a recipe for disaster if you
don’t have a software package integrated into your system with updated tracking
abilities.
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| Configurable Resource Scheduler - Booking Chart |
Tracking
orders begins at order placement. Components needed have to be obtained from
outside which requires scheduling vendors to complete tasks in advance of your
customer deadlines. Scheduling software has taken planning to a whole new level
of efficiency allowing a smoother work flow and greater visibility to both you
and your customer.
With
greater visibility, bottlenecks or issues can be identified early on and
addressed before scheduling ship dates are affected. For example, you may have
a product which always gets held up in a final testing stage but your sales
people and schedulers don’t recognize this when setting ship dates. The
software can automatically show extra time needed for a specific task thereby
allowing a longer lead time up front. The customer can understand longer lead
times. They are not experts on what you supply them with and usually will
understand when you give them longer lead times. What they can’t understand is
when you promise shipment at a particular time and it just doesn't happen. This
increases the lead time on their side for the end customer; and like a snowball
rolling down hill, it will simply get worse as it moves down the chain.
Another
issue commonly seen in scheduling is when more than one order needs to be
running at the same time but no one was aware at the order entry end. In the
past, when a customer called with an order, all that happened was that a sales
person entered the order with no knowledge of what was currently going on. With
this enhanced software, issues such as these are eliminated entirely.
Most
software packages today have graphical interfacing which allows for ease of
interface between users and software. Gantt and bar graph capabilities are
great tools built in to most software. In addition, they offer fill-able templates for increased order entry speeds. If your company is trying to work
in tomorrow’s world with today’s technology, you may want to move into the
realm of resource scheduling software.
