It's a real challenge. Most ERP systems that provide effective scheduling tools are way too expensive for small businesses.

When we started out with Fraction ERP, this is something we wanted to resolve. Low cost ERP with great tools that are simple to use.

The scheduling tools we have in Fraction are straightforward. We have opted for a visual scheduling screen where you can see the committed capacity in each of the buckets you are scheduling for. You can see this screen in the image below.

You can schedule in weekly buckets, daily buckets or hourly buckets. You can use our automatic forward scheduling tool if you want to.

The great thing about this approach is the time saving. If you operate a small business then there is a good chance that you don't have a full time scheduler working for you. Many businesses spend hours each day moving production orders around their scheduling system, to reflect changes in their order book.

We took an iterative approach. Rough schedule the weeks and then finite plan the days and hours as you get closer to production starting. This approach saves a lot of time, and lets you ignore the many small changes that naturally ripple through an order book.

Once the schedule is fixed, the work to lists and the shop floor data collection all come to life! This approach is a great way to save hours each day from the scheduling and monitoring that many supervisors and managers find themselves stuck with.

If you want to learn more about Fraction ERP, and how it can help you to schedule your manufacturing workloads (plus make you more productive generally), then sign up for our free demo. If you like what you see, you can evaluate our software with a free fourteen day trial of our cloud based ERP system.

Scheduling has never been so easy, or accessible, for small manufacturing businesses.