Preactor

Services

Before the customers has to commit to buying the SAGE ERP X3 Preactor template a 2 day Design Workshop is carried out with the customer (1 day of analysis + 1 day of report) to ensure that the solution will meet their needs. When this is complete the software can be purchased and a further 8 days will be required for implementation and training.

If the template functionalities are not suitable and cannot meet with the customer’s requirements, then we would advise on a full Preactor project with Licensing, consulting, and maintenance that we or a Preactor accredited partner can undertake.

The customer can start with the template and later upgrade then to a full version of Preactor if required. Then and in that case, they would only pay the difference between the full version and the price they have already paid for the template. Also a certain number of consulting days will also be required to upgrade the application. This will subject of a quotation by us or a Preactor accredited partner.

Preactor for SAGE 50/200/500

Sage Group offer a number of modules for manufacturers in their Sage 50, Sage 200 and Sage 500 products. Each of these is ‘Powered by Preactor’ but they have different features and functionality.
 

The Sage Manufacturing Controller Graphical Planner is powered by Preactor 100 FCS. It has been setup to work with the data available from Manufacturing Controller and is fixed in terms of the fields available to you. This is also available for Sage 200.
 

The Sage Graphical Planner (Sage FCS) is powered by Preactor 200 FCS and Sage Production Scheduling (Sage APS) is powered by Preactor 400 APS. Again both of these Sage products have a fixed database structure and menu options.
 

If you have already purchased one of these Sage products you may not be getting everything you want from them.
 

We provide services and support to help you make the most of Preactor’s powerful planning and scheduling features to provide your business with the visibility it needs to be more agile and more responsive to the variability in demand that many companies are experiencing today.
 

We offer a half day of our time to see how you are using Preactor and advise on what more you could be getting from your system. We are not Sage experts. There are many other companies that provide this expertise. But having implemented Preactor in hundreds of companies we understand the needs of planners and can discuss with them the best way to work with it.
 

Proper training is essential to make users aware of the range of features available to planners within your Preactor system. We run regular training courses at out training facility in Chippenham. The most popular is the 3 day user course. This is run every month. This course covers all the features available in the Preactor versions used in the Sage Graphical Planner, Graphical Planning and Production Scheduling modules.
 

Users of versions the Sage Graphical Planner, Graphical Planning and Production Scheduling products have the opportunity to upgrade their fixed database applications to one that can be customised by you or an accredited Preactor Partner.
 

The Graphical Planner uses the Manufacturing Controller’s Start and End dates for each manufacturing order to synchronise assembly processes. The Start and End dates are calculated during the BoM explosion in the Manufacturing Controller, and whilst they are generally adequate in simple assembly processes, in more complex situations it is possible for an assembly to be scheduled before its component parts are available.   

The Assembly Controller addresses this problem by physically pegging together the orders using the BoM data provided by the Manufacturing Controller.

In this Graphical Planner schedule the black wheel assembly operation has been delayed by the yellow operation causing the blue bike assembly to be started before the wheels are complete.

 

In the second screen shown in the next column the Assembly Controller has pegged the orders together and the pegging is indicated by the dotted arrows (solid arrows are operation relationships within an order). The pegging information has enabled the Assembly Controller to make sure that the bike assembly (blue) does not start until the wheels (black) are complete.
 

 

The Graphical Planner is a single constraint scheduler. This means that for your primary resources (typically your machines) it will ensure that each resource is only expected to process one task at a time, it does not constrain the usage of secondary resources such as operators and tooling. 

This can be a problem if you have, say, ten machines but only seven operators so three machines will always be idle. In this environment the Graphical Planner will warn you that you are overloading your secondary resources, but you will have to rectify the situation by manually adjusting the schedule.



The Assembly Controller is a multiple constraint scheduler, so it will automatically ensure that you do not overload your secondary resources. In the ten machine example it will only load seven machines at any point in time.


 

The Sage Line 50 Graphical Planner for the Manufacturing Controller is ‘Powered by Preactor’. Preactor is unique in the scheduling software world in that it comes in different ‘flavours’ or versions each having a different set of features and functionality but each with the same set of core components. This means that you can easily upgrade your Sage Line 50 Graphical Planner to one of the Preactor solutions if you need the additional features available.

The Sage Assembly Controller (pdf, 389kb) leaflet provides information on the additional features available by upgrading to the Preactor Assembly Controller. The upgrade is available to Sage Line 50 Manufacturing Controller users for £4,950.

See also: Sage Integration Case Studies