Preactor is not a single solution, it is a family of products that are suitable for small, medium and large corporations.
Small businesses often have simpler planning and scheduling needs but also may not have the IT knowledge and support to use a scheduling solution to the best advantage. Also they may not need or want to connect their scheduling solution with their other software.
For this reason Preactor Express is aimed at very small businesses. It can be installed straight out of the box and provides the visibility for the planner to see the impact of new orders arriving on efficiency and capacity utilisation.
This shows the Gantt chart of the schedule generated for a typical job shop environment. It shows the resources to be assigned operations or tasks to on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal axis starting at current time and extending to the right into the future.
Each coloured bar represents a specific operation or process step for a specific order; the front of the bar is set to when the process is scheduled to start and the end of the bar when the process is scheduled to finish. The black area at the start of a bar represents setup time. The process times are calculated automatically from data such as batch size and estimated time per part in the batch. The shaded areas represent different shift states. Here the white area represent ‘on shift’ and the shaded areas ‘off shift’ or ‘break’. Start and finish times for each task automatically takes into account the states of each resource over the process and setup time.
Each resource then has a number of operations assigned to it over the period displayed. The Lathe has been assigned 7 operations, starting with the orange bar and ending with the dark blue bar. This represents the ‘work-to list’ of work for that resource and the sequence in which each operation is to be carried out.
The white pop-up tool tip appears automatically as you place the mouse over an operation bar. It shows additional detail about that operation.
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Various textual reports come with Express including:-
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Product List (including routing)
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Orders Summary
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Operations Summary
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Late operations summary filtered by due date
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List of operations due for completion by day
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Route for each order (route card, traveller)
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Work-to list for each resource or resource group
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Schedule analysis reports for comparing one possible schedule with another
On-line videos and on-line help offer user support and other training options are also available for getting more help.
There is also a
Preactor Express User Forum.
For more information about how Preactor can work with small businesses please see our
Preactor case studies.