After Oracle’s acquisition of JD Edwards in 2006, Oracle has been touting best-in-class production scheduling (PS) software for all the obvious reasons. While more customers are adopting Oracle Production Scheduling to eliminate bottlenecks and improve production performance, some manufacturing companies are still wondering why they should switch from Oracle Production Scheduling to Production Scheduling.

These are the main reasons:

· Oracle PS is a versatile application that can be stand-alone or integrated with manufacturing planning and execution systems, unlike manufacturing scheduling, which works primarily in conjunction with the manufacturing execution system – work in process (WIP). With Production Scheduling’s closed-loop integration with Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP), shop floor jobs can be better scheduled to optimize resource planning and maximize service levels.

· Oracle PS with its powerful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be used as a tool to ensure that the schedule scenario meets the corporate end goals. Comparison of different scheduling scenarios is instantly displayed in Oracle Production Scheduling KPIs with details of service level, inventory, resources, and manufacturing utilization. This makes decision analysis quite straightforward. Many expert schedulers using Oracle Manufacturing Scheduling have long desired such powerful functionality.

Oracle Production Scheduling can automatically detect floating resource bottlenecks as they move within a schedule. This understanding helps PS Solver implement the most appropriate

Scheduling strategy to maximize performance and optimize resource utilization.

On the other hand, resolving the bottleneck required a lot of constant rule tweaking in previous Oracle Manufacturing Scheduling.

· Production scheduling provides a number of views that can provide users with powerful analysis to support their decision making. Some of these views and user interfaces are:

o Production traceability (supply/demand traceability with easy to drill down alert and root causes)

o Gantt of resources and operations

o Chart of resources and elements

o Resource Gantt and multi-capacity resource chart

o Operation editor and graphical routing

or change of editor

Performance: Oracle PS uses smarter constraint-driven search technology that achieves the benefits of constraint-based programming with much better performance than traditional tools like Oracle Manufacturing Scheduling. This is another reason why production scheduling becomes a tool of choice when production volume or production constraints are higher.

Oracle PS is much simpler to configure, but offers powerful scheduling strategies to optimize production without much trial and error. This lowers the total cost of ownership.

CONCLUSION

Oracle Production Scheduling is truly the best next generation software offering huge advantages over Oracle’s previous manufacturing scheduling tool. There are a number of extra PS capabilities (not covered in this short blog) that, if implemented well, can make programming really productive.