Production Planning and Scheduling
This AI solution focuses on optimizing how manufacturing plants plan capacity, sequence jobs, and schedule production across machines, lines, and shifts. It replaces manual or spreadsheet-based planning with systems that automatically create feasible, constraint-aware plans that align demand with available capacity. These tools consider factors like machine availability, changeover times, workforce constraints, rush orders, and maintenance windows to generate schedules that are both realistic and optimized. It matters because traditional planning is slow, error-prone, and unable to react quickly to disruptions such as breakdowns, supply delays, or sudden changes in demand. By using advanced algorithms to continuously re-balance demand and capacity, manufacturers can improve on-time delivery, increase throughput, reduce overtime and changeovers, and make better use of existing assets—while also freeing planners from manual firefighting so they can focus on higher-value decision-making and scenario analysis.
The Problem
“Your production schedule breaks daily—and planners rebuild it in spreadsheets”
Organizations face these key challenges:
Schedules ignore real constraints (changeovers, tooling, labor skills, maintenance), so the shop floor constantly deviates
Planners spend hours firefighting: re-sequencing jobs after breakdowns, material delays, or rush orders
On-time delivery suffers because priorities are inconsistent across plants/lines and expediting becomes the default