Planning & Forecasting

The planning processes are the heart of any business. In this era of reduced margins and increased cost pressures, it is vitally important for companies to have up to the minute information on their capabilities and the production plan. Small errors in managing the planning process can add costs, which turn a profit into a loss. Missing inventory at critical points in the sales and/or production process, not scheduling people or machines optimally, or simple mistakes in planning can mean the difference between staying in business and failing. At Rover Data Systems, our history of managing the planning process has made us very aware of the critical importance of these applications. In fact, we started the business because we saw that this area was not being adequately addressed by many of the existing products. Our goal is to give you the management and planning applications you need to run your business profitably and efficiently.

In some companies MRP has a bad reputation. This is often the result of using a system that was ill suited for the company or which introduced foreign processes that disrupted the existing planning process. The Rover MRP application was designed to provide the fundamentals of a good MRP system while still being flexible enough to incorporate many of the processes that you already have in place. It was designed to be easy to learn and use.

The Material Requirements Planning application provides the tools you need to plan and control the material management processes of Purchasing and Shop Floor Production. You determine what drives demand because, within the system, demand for parts can come from actual sales orders, upper level work orders, from the Master Planning Schedule application through a master schedule, sales forecasts, independent demand and/or planning bills. Our native application integration allows all appropriate modules to have visibility into component and sub-assembly requirements.

• Allows the launching of orders from the planner screen
• Stores all supply and demand information in a bucketless format
• Displays planning information in user-definable planning periods
• Produces exception reports targeted at each department’s needs
• Enables strategic planning with multi-level planning and scheduling
• Pegs requirements to next or top-level assembly
• Enables each center to view workload
• Recommends optimum production and purchasing schedule
• Provides both vertical and horizontal planning reports
• Uses shop calendar with your business’s work schedule and holidays
• Plans work and purchase orders based upon pre-defined order policies

In many cases, simply using the MRP system to drive demand from orders is not an efficient way to do production planning. Companies need to be able to determine a Master Production Schedule to plan the production schedule before the order hits the sales desk. In today’s customer driven business environment, your customers expect quick response to their orders. They won’t work with suppliers who can’t meet this need. In order to satisfy your customer’s demands, you need a powerful Master Production Schedule to set the basis for what will be made and when, consuming orders so that your shop floor demand remains consistent. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. The Rover ERP MPS allows you gather all the inputs that impact your production plan and then use this information to build user defined production schedules. MPS is robust, powerful, and flexible.

• Allows management to project sales activity and its impact on the production schedule
• Takes input from the sales forecast
• Enables strategic planning using multi-level planning and scheduling capabilities
• Provides planning bill facility to forecast product families by percentage
• Calculates available to promise inventory to assure customer order accuracy and customer satisfaction
• Provides User-defined, unlimited planning horizon

When operating on tight margins and tight time schedules it is important to manage all of the resources and capacity within the company. The Rover ERP Capacity Planning application gives you the tools to plan the use of facilities, machines and personnel to their optimum usage. This increases margins while reducing unexpected costs. The CRP application relieves bottlenecks by pointing out over-utilized assets and tells you where opportunities are being missed due to under-utilization.

• Graphical view of work center capacities
• Allows you to make maximum usage of people, machines and facilities
• Generate what-if scenarios
• Points out areas of over and under utilization
• Points out bottlenecks
• Prevents unexpected and unbudgeted expenses from missing the production schedule and working overtime to catch up
• Gives you an up to the minute view of your production assets

This part of the Rover ERP system allows you to forecast demand for parts based upon a variety of methods. You can base a future forecast on past sales or past usage, depending upon whether the part is actually sold, or just used within another part. Once the forecast is loaded, you can adjust forecasted percentages by period to take into account any business factors you deem necessary. From there, you can create Master Schedule records, Sales Forecast records or Independent Demand records, depending upon which portions of the system you are using.

• Base future forecast on past sales or usage
• Adjust future forecast by percentages
• Load forecast by part, model, category