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Insights on production scheduling, lean manufacturing, and manufacturing software from 35+ years of industry experience.
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What Is a Prior Operations Safety Prompt in Scheduling?
A prior operations safety prompt fires when you log actuals on a step whose earlier steps have none. It offers to fill the gap from plan, or to send you back to log it properly.
What Is a Procured Item in Manufacturing?
A procured item is a product you buy rather than make. Learn how the procured flag separates purchased inputs from manufactured products, and why it has no routing.
What Is a Product Category in Manufacturing Software?
A product category is a named grouping on the product master that organizes the catalog for filtering and reporting. Learn what it controls and what it deliberately does not.
What Is a Quote Expiry Date?
A quote expiry date is the last day a quoted price and promise date are meant to stand. Learn why capacity movement makes an old simulation fiction, and what to re-run.
What Is a Reporting Window?
A reporting window is the from and to date range a report runs over. Learn why reports are point-in-time, what no data really means, and how defaults work.
What Is a Sales Order Reference Number?
A sales order reference number is the order's human-readable identifier, required on every order and unique per customer. See how the rules work.
What Is a Shift Priority Score in Scheduling?
A shift priority score ranks candidate shifts before the scheduler books any hours, weighting immediate availability first, then free capacity, then how early in the day the shift starts.
What Is a Simultaneous Capacity Slot in Scheduling?
A simultaneous capacity slot is a moment when every machine in a parallel group can start together. Learn the four checks it must pass and why it is all or nothing.
What Is a Targeted Reschedule?
A targeted reschedule re-plans only the jobs you actually changed, leaving every other job and its reserved capacity exactly where it was. Definition, example, and when to use it.
What Is a Work Center Availability Flag?
A work center availability flag tells the scheduler to skip a resource entirely, and an effective date keeps a machine out of the plan until it is commissioned.
What Is a Work Center Occurrence Suffix in a Routing?
An occurrence suffix distinguishes repeat visits to the same machine in one routing, so a job that mills, heat-treats, then mills again keeps two distinct steps rather than one confused one.
What Is an Import Run Log?
An import run log is the per-run file recording every row an import processed, its outcome, and the exact reason for each failure. Learn what it contains and how to read it.