Advanced planning and scheduling catching on

APS (advanced planning and scheduling) and FCS (finite capacity scheduling) software developer Preactor reckons understanding of its benefits over MRP is growing. The company says it saw another record year of growth in 2005 – taking it now to installations in more than 1,600 companies in 51 countries. Says chairman and managing director Mike Novels: “We added more than 500 licenses to our user total in 2005 while many of our competitors have not been able to achieved one tenth of this. Our revenues are up by 20% and we are looking forward to 2006 with understandable optimism.” On top of that, the company has secured significant new partnership deals with ERP providers, effectively bringing its planning and scheduling add-on systems to an even bigger manufacturing base. Latest to sign up include Sage, McGuffie Brunton and Azur. Sage’s new Manufacturing Controller for Sage Line 50 is integrated and ‘Powered by Preactor’; McGuffie Brunton and Syspro UK have integrated Preactor into its Syspro ERP; and Azur has created a manufacturing module for SAP Business One based on Preactor’s 500 APS version which offers scheduling, CTP (capable to promise) and BoM (bill of materials) explosion capabilities. “Often users find that the functionality offered by their ERP software just isn’t enough, and they resort to using spreadsheets,” explains Novels. “These often become heavily customised, insufficiently integrated and still do not offer the ‘what if’ capability to compare alternative schedules that planners need to test solutions to unforeseen events.”