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, enhanced 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.
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 fillable 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 multi-user resource scheduling software.
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