When should you choose customized planning and scheduling software?

Packaged planning applications are usually, but not always, your company's best option, according to ARC Advisory Group.

By Staff -- Modern Materials Handling, 5/30/2007

When it comes to planning and scheduling software, packaged applications are usually—but not always—your company’s best option. That’s according to Simon Bragg, a software analyst at ARC Advisory Group.

“There are many packaged applications available today for optimal planning and scheduling for supply chain, manufacturing and transportation,” Bragg writes in a recent report. In most cases, he says, these applications provide adequate plans at the least cost. But in some cases, more expensive customized software is actually a better choice.

What are these special cases?

• When multiple packaged applications (or multiple modules of the same application) would be necessary
• When you need considerable flexibility in evaluating alternative plans
• When your company is part of a small industry
• When your goal is something other than maximizing profit/minimizing cost

Beware multiple modules
If a packaged application forces you to plan one stage of your business and then to use those plans to optimize the next stage, says Bragg, you should consider a customized application that allows you to plan both stages at once.

One such example, he says, is a brewery with a packaging line directly feeding rail cars for transporting its beer. In this case, an optimum production schedule doesn’t necessarily suit the transportation schedule, and vice versa. The brewery’s best option, says Bragg, may be a customized application that optimizes the production and transportation schedules together.

Weighing complex alternatives
Packaged applications, says Bragg, aren’t designed to support complicated planning that involves choosing among multiple scenarios and multiple options where each option has recourse actions that depend on which scenario unfolds.

Small industries
If your industry has too few participants, says Bragg, software companies won’t be able to justify developing packaged applications to sell to such a limited market.

Different objectives
Most packaged planning software, says Bragg, is designed to maximize profit or minimize cost. If your company is working toward another goal—such as minimizing or maximizing working capital at the end of a fiscal year—a customized planning application may be necessary.