A custom woodworking company executes at any time multiple jobs / projects using a set of resources such as machines and workers. The jobs have different due dates, priorities, quantities and process & resource requirements but each resource normally works on a single operation at any time and have specific available times like shift times. The job diversity, the multitude of operations in each job, dependency relations among the operations, simultaneous processing of several jobs, and finite capacity of resources make production planning and scheduling quite difficult. The poor predictability caused by these factors contributes to anxiety, stress and firefighting unless job lead times are set to be long or resources are abundant. For custom manufacturing units, an important concern is how to quote a rational due date for each new job based on the planned and existing workload and resource capacities. The next concern is to determine a right start time for each new job such that its due date is met with small lead time. Job due dates and start times must be fixed such that due dates are satisfactory to customers and easily met with small lead times and low WIP and throughput and resource utilizations are high. Experience and good practices may not always be sufficient to efficiently manage simultaneous production of multiple diverse jobs using finite capacity resources. Efficient management of such production requires workflow prediction, which cannot be easily achieved by experience and practices alone. An efficient solution for production planning and scheduling, workflow prediction and what-if analysis can greatly help the management of heterogeneous workload. 

Optisol offers custom woodworking shops a state-of-the-art software, Schedlyzer, for production scheduling and workflow prediction. It is based on a rigorous scheduling model for custom production and powerful algorithms. It leverages 30 years of research and consulting experience in scheduling and optimization.  Schedlyzer's immediate practical advantages include:

1. Determination of a rational and practical due date for each new job / project
2. Determination of a right start time for each new job / project for a given due date
3. Development of a meaningful schedule for each resource without overloading
4. Prediction of workflow, bottleneck formations and job / project completion times
5. Quick rescheduling subject to all relevant constraints
6. Fast and extensive what-if analysis of schedules.

The overall advantages of Schedlyzer include:

1.  Increase in shop throughput, on-time delivery, customer confidence and resource utilization
2. Reduction in WIP and project cycle times
3. A common understanding of workflow among all the concerned people
4. Strategic capacity planning.

Schedlyzer is a windows-based software. It can be easily integrated with any ODBC-compliant database. Many small custom manufacturers can also use it as a simple, user-friendly standalone software for resource-constrained project scheduling. Optisol offers the full power of Schedlyzer to small job shops at highly reduced prices with an upper limit on the number of operations to be scheduled. The site license fee for Schedlyzer (wit no limit on the number of copies for internal use) depends on this limit. 

We offer a free trial version of Schedlyzer for a month after modeling the production system (relations among jobs, operations, work centers, machines, workers, skills, etc) in a scientific manner. The service for modeling exercise is also free. Although the software is based on advanced scheduling algorithms, it is very user friendly. Regarding training on the software, our clients never asked for formal training after the trial runs of the software.