The Five Fatal Flaws


The list below is not meant to be all inclusive but it will help you avoid some of the most fatal mistakes. A brief review of this list can help you turn disaster into the kind of success that will help your bottom line for a long time to come. Those who are serious about knowing more details should contact Mike Liddell at mliddell@stpartners.net or read his new book on scheduling.

This book was written to protect managers and executives by giving them information that is not available to them anywhere else. A couple of hours spent reading this book will prevent them from being exploited by consultants and others who use confusion about APS to make easy money and then disappear when the going gets tough. You can find out more about this very successful book at www.littlebluebookonscheduling.com

 

  1. Know what you want (and what you don’t want).

You could argue that this applies to any implementation but you would be missing the point because scheduling always requires you to balance a number of competing objectives. This means that you must prioritize your objectives otherwise you will never be able to win. If you think this is easy you probably don’t understand the problem. The inability to agree on and articulate a clear set of objectives was evident in 100% of the failures that we studied.

We recommend that if you only get help in one area that this is the most important area because failure to get this right will almost guarantee that you will waste every penny you spend on this project not to mention the short-term and long-term harm you will do to both your company and the moral of your employees.


  1. Your APS system must be able to fit the way you do business.

When you buy a new ERP system it is quite normal to modify certain business processes to fit the way the new ERP module works (e.g. Accounts Payable or Payroll). When it comes to the world of scheduling this is a recipe for disaster. Your APS system must be able to handle your real world constraints today and in the foreseeable future. You need to know that if your scheduling system fails to create schedules that make sense, nobody will follow them and it will quickly become irrelevant.

What you should be looking for in an APS system is a set of tools that can be configured or modified to meet your specific scheduling needs. Unless you really understand this you are quite likely to select the wrong software which all but guarantees failure. Doing a proof of concept is highly recommended under certain conditions.

 

  1. The optimization fallacy.

Novice APS implementers (and many supposed experts) think that an APS system should create the optimal schedule. Based on our extensive experience we wholeheartedly disagree. Whereas we believe that it is often possible to optimize work at a specific operation we think that trying to optimize the flow of work through multiple machines and multiple steps is usually an exercise in futility.

What does work though is designing your APS system to consistently, quickly and intelligently create a good schedule using the 80/20 principal. This means that your APS system should do approximately 80% of the intelligent number crunching while providing the tools for the scheduler to fine tune the schedule using their experience and expertise.

 

  1. Getting the basics right first.

The only way to build a good scheduling system is to get the basics right first. No amount of fancy reports and analysis tools are of any use unless your APS system can quickly, systematically and accurately:

    • create a smart synchronized action plan that eliminates confusion and gets everybody working together on the highest priority orders.

    • highlight the downstream cascading impact of change so that you can easily identify potential problems and hopefully solve them before they actually happen.

More sophisticated scheduling techniques can be added later but attempting to run before you can walk is almost always a fatal error.


  1. Be careful who you ask for help.

ERP vendors become efficient and profitable by implementing cookie cutter solutions and for the most part do not have the skill set to understand the design issues and the technical issues required to mold your APS system to fit your unique manufacturing environment. Unless you have proven in-house experience then you should find a partner who has a proven track record and can show you that they not only thoroughly understand your unique needs, they know how to address them. Having someone to guide you each step of the way will greatly reduce the risk of unexpected delays, cost overruns, uncertainty and most of all creating schedules that are either inaccurate or make no sense to anyone.