Enterprise resource planning ERP concept. Businessman offer ERP business management software for collect, store, manage and interpret business data about customers, HR, production, logistics, financials and marketing.

What is the one thing that sets a business apart from its competitors? A superb product or excellent customer service? A perfectly-targeted marketing campaign or a lifetime warranty policy?

The truth is that all these things can set a business apart, but there is something even more critical to consider: on-time shipping and delivery.

Your customers expect on-time delivery when they order your products. If you can’t provide that, you will lose more customers than you will ever gain. This may seem simple enough, but it is easy to lose track of all the details when you have to worry about hundreds of orders at a time.

Without Epicor® Kinetic ERP software, you might not be able to do it all yourself. This software is essential for creating efficient scheduling for all your work orders or jobs.

That’s where Epicor® Kinetic finite scheduling comes into play.

Keep reading to learn more about Epicor Kinetic Job Scheduling and how it can help your production floor deliver products on time.

What Is Epicor® Kinetic ERP Job Scheduling?

At its simplest definition, job scheduling is the process your ERP software performs to ensure a customer shipping date is met while enabling on-time delivery. The software works backward from the customer’s requested delivery date to assign start and end dates for each critical portion of the work.

There are two kinds of job scheduling to consider: infinite and finite scheduling.

Infinite Scheduling

Infinite scheduling performs all the work we discussed above, but it doesn’t consider your current workload. It will assume you have infinite resources and capacity to complete every customer order on time.

You can see where the problems with this come into play. If your software schedules job tasks for you without considering your current capacity, you’ll find yourself unable to meet production deadlines.

Finite Scheduling

As you might assume, finite scheduling is the exact opposite of infinite scheduling. While it performs the same function, it does it fundamentally differently.

Rather than plan jobs as if you had infinite resources available, finite scheduling takes into consideration the available resource capacities, including team members, as well as assets.

Finite scheduling is the more effective and accurate module, and companies that want to take their business to the next level should learn how to use it more efficiently.

Different Types of Finite Scheduling

You can configure your finite scheduling module in Epicor ERP to account for all of your specifications. Let’s take a look at the top ways you can configure your finite scheduling module.

Order Based Scheduling

Using order-based scheduling, you or the software can determine which orders should be prioritized over others based on your current work in progress (WIP) specifications.

This is helpful when you want to have more control over the prioritization of orders. That way, you can expedite specific orders when necessary.

Constraint-Based Scheduling

This type of finite scheduling is all about identifying bottlenecks in your production line and scheduling the jobs around those bottlenecks. Constraint-based scheduling ensures that these bottlenecks are always loaded to no longer slow down the shipping process.

Electronic Scheduling Board

This is the simplest form of finite scheduling and looks like a traditional card-based loading board. It gives you a view of all the currently running jobs and gathers data to calculate overall performance time.

The system will warn you about bottlenecks or if you try to load two jobs on a single machine simultaneously.

Discrete Event Simulation

Discrete event simulation models the random events that can happen to your production line and determines the effect that they would have on your shipping time.

This is incredibly helpful to identify potential bottlenecks and other problems, which only increases your overall production and shipping time.

Genetic Algorithms

Algorithms can be intimidating because of the sheer amount of math that goes into them, but a newer method of finite scheduling makes them more accessible. Genetic algorithms are reasonably new to the scheduling game, but they have already had a profound impact on job scheduling.

Genetic algorithms are constantly finding ways to improve jobs and minimize total time to shipping by taking the sound characteristics from previous (parent) jobs and creating new (child) jobs that capitalize on those benefits.

It’s kind of like natural selection. Only the fastest jobs win.