profits.ie has teamed up with Preactor International to bring to Ireland the full suite of Preactor scheduling software products.  We are full partners and can supply, implement and support the full product family. 

What is Preactor?

Better on-time, in-full, delivery performance is almost a given from advanced planning and scheduling software, able to quickly and dynamically schedule and re-schedule production orders to take into account not only real-world capacity limits, but unexpected events that pop up and bite us. For many, however, APS has also yielded benefits spreading far beyond. In fact, although APS projects have traditionally been started to solve planning problems, the results can be so great that APS is ultimately viewed as pivotal both to the business and its supply chain.

APS software can be critical to staving off competition. As lower cost economies have an increasing impact, companies have to look strategically at how they can provide extra value. One way might be to make smaller batches at shorter time intervals with fewer inventories, but to do that you need to see plans in more detail, more frequently, and assess the impact of different decisions. That's where APS type tools can help. It works by building a schedule into the future – and that can be for today's shift, this year's production forecast, or anything in between – that takes into account the fact that all manner of resources are not infinite, as we might like, but constrained. Thus raw material availability, the number, type and capabilities of machines on the shop-floor, the time available and even the available personnel and their skill sets can all be factored into the equation to produce a realistic and credible plan.

By being able to respond to 'what-if' questions, APS provides a crystal ball to look into the future for different scenarios based on what's happening in the factory today. It provides a valuable tool for coping with the unexpected and also for short-term variability. And that's whether it's a manufacturing process that produces a range of different qualities, perhaps due to raw material variations, that might need to be allocated to different customers, or coping with the unpredictability of fresh ingredients availability.