Production Planning and Scheduling Tools

The problem

Production planning at a large food processing operation relied on a combination of Emydex data, manual spreadsheets and knowledge held by experienced planners. There was no single view of what was scheduled, what capacity was available, or how actual throughput compared to plan.

Planners spent significant time each day extracting data from Emydex, combining it with spreadsheet-based capacity models, and distributing the result by email. By the time the information reached supervisors it was already partially out of date.

Management had no real-time view of production performance against target. Yield data — a critical metric in meat processing — required manual calculation from multiple data sources.

What was built

A suite of production planning and reporting tools integrated directly with Emydex and SQL Server:

• Real-time production dashboard showing scheduled vs actual throughput by line and shift
• Capacity planning interface allowing planners to model schedules against known constraints
• Yield reporting by product, line and shift — calculated automatically from kill and boning data
• Automated daily production summary distributed by email each morning
• Exception reporting — lines or shifts performing outside tolerance flagged automatically
• Integration with SQL Server via SSIS pipelines pulling Emydex data on a scheduled basis

The outcome

Production management gained real-time visibility of performance against plan for the first time. Manual spreadsheet compilation eliminated. Yield reporting automated. Daily summary distributed automatically rather than compiled by hand each morning.