ERP systems vs. advanced planning and scheduling software

APS and ERP are both critical tools for any manufacturing business with efficiency and optimisation goals, but they each have specific roles to play and neither one of them can do the job of the other. Let's compare APS and ERP, how they each benefit manufacturing teams and, ultimately, improve your bottom line.

How does ERP support manufacturers?

ERP systems are designed to help every individual in the business to work effectively, ensuring that processes are followed, data is collected to provide insights, and the right information is available to each individual at the point in the process that they need it.

An ERP system ensures that all business processes – including estimating and sales order processing, materials planning and purchasing, and finance – work together seamlessly, using the same data set and presenting information to the relevant individuals as they work.

At a management and board level, an ERP system allows top level decisions to be data-driven, with insights and business intelligence available in real time so that the team driving your business have current information at their fingertips, both to run things operationally day-to-day, but also to plan for the coming weeks and months.

From accurate sales forecasting to WIP and cash flow, analysis of profitability by product, cell or line, as well as levels of traceability and reporting that would otherwise require logistical somersaults to keep track of, all the information that allows you to run your business effectively is available direct from an ERP system.

How does APS support manufacturers?

Production scheduling software is designed with one purpose in mind: to create the most effective plan for your manufacturing plant to run efficiently, whilst meeting your customers’ needs.

Based on the information set up in your ERP system around BoMs (bills of materials), routings (a breakdown of each stage and process of manufacture along with resources required including labour type and machine), MRP (material availability), and the required completion date of a job, APS software will allocate each step of the manufacture process a timeslot with the right equipment, labour and materials applied.

Based upon parameters that reflect your specific operators and equipment, realistic constraints are applied within the software which mean that your schedule reflects your actual capacity and constraints.

In essence, APS does what any old-school production planner would do using excel and whiteboards, only it does this with far greater accuracy, with full knowledge of all variables and constraints, with a visual Gantt chart that every person within the business can view for their own needs, and with the ability to make real-time changes and understand the operational impact of those in seconds.

APS software is a tool for your planners to work with to provide them with the optimum manufacturing schedule to minimise costs, maximise capacity and ultimately increase profitability.

How do APS and ERP support one another?

ERP, amongst many other business support processes, provides your APS software with the data that it needs to run the algorithms that provide the many outputs for scheduling, running ‘what if’ scenarios and providing intelligent insights on capacity.

APS uses that information to create a production schedule for every manufacturing cell or line based on the constraints of your specific operational set up and the requirements of your clients.

The visibility provided by APS and the data collected and analysed by ERP enables your business to become slicker; routings become more accurate as you collect data on actual run times versus planned, material use and purchases can be run to JIT based upon the production planning software’s output, and stockholding can be reduced along with WIP.

The use of the two systems in parallel gives all your staff the tools to be able to do their jobs better, more efficiently and in alignment with one another.

If you have an ERP in place, why do you need APS?

Though some ERP software solutions have Gantt charts which can be used for planning and scheduling, they can be difficult to configure as they have not been designed for this purpose. They also do not offer the level of granularity which an APS system can.

ERP systems often struggle to allow for scenario analysis due to their complexity and hypothetical resources having to be created within a live system. Scenario analysis, an essential feature of APS systems, allows for the senior management team to make accurate decisions that can be delivered in reality.

With APS, you have the ability to run multiple ‘what if’ scenarios so that you can see the impact of moving a job or changing the running order of work.

APS is a game-changer for many businesses because it allows you to make real-time changes to your constraints to reflect equipment breakdowns or maintenance, operator holiday or sickness, and changing client demands.

APS allows your manufacturing and planning teams to optimise output on a micro level, to ensure that you are running the most efficient production schedule and to provide you with the marginal gains that can push your business to the next level.

It is also a tool for management to be able to assess how to scale up the business, providing a full insight into capacity levels, bottlenecks and areas where investment is needed to facilitate an increased throughput.

When there are many operators, each building different sections of a variety of products using complex and expensive machinery at a required level of output, the time spent investing up front in an effective plan is proving to be critical for those manufacturing businesses operating in increasingly competitive marketplaces and to ever more demanding OTIF targets. This is where an APS system comes into its own.

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