Features
Schedule your production plan efficiently and reliably in just seconds.
SkyPlanner’s built-in AI schedules your production and makes production planning easy.
Use SkyPlanner standalone, import data, or integrate with your ERP system.
Artificial intelligence
Optimize your entire production process in seconds with Arcturus AI’s powerful algorithm while maintaining complete control through an intuitive interface.
Reaction
The AI optimizes your production in changing situations, continually maintaining an up-to-date plan.
Transparency
Enjoy real-time insights into your entire production chain through SkyPlanner’s intuitive GANTT timeline and reports. Get a complete overview of your production and make informed decisions at a glance.
Data
Use SkyPlanner on its own, add data from other software, or integrate it into your ERP system. SkyPlanner includes modern features for data management and API interfaces.
Mobile Confirmations
Allow employees to conveniently acknowledge the start and completion of work steps in real-time via SkyPlanner’s mobile view.
Adaptability
Customize SkyPlanner’s features precisely to your company’s needs with its versatile settings.
Control
Maintain absolute authority at every stage of the production process with SkyPlanner’s user-friendly control panel.
Production scheduling with artificial intelligence
At the core of SkyPlanner, our developed Arcturus AI goes several steps further than traditional methods in production planning. The AI understands the complexity of your production process and considers countless variables – from material situations and inventory to labor and machine availability.
The AI optimizes and adapts to changing conditions, providing you with continuously updated production plans. This keeps your production flexible and efficient while you can monitor and control the production process in real-time. Using Arcturus AI is very easy and user-friendly.
Real-time GANTT timeline
You can track and control the AI’s operation from a visual and user-friendly GANTT timeline. You can easily retrieve details about your production and solve production problems and bottlenecks in advance with the help of AI.
SkyPlanner’s GANTT timeline is like a factory control center that helps you stay up-to-date with your production.
Dynamic priorities
Dynamic priorities are at the core of SkyPlanner, enhancing AI-assisted production planning. You thus direct the AI with your wishes. This feature allows you to set priorities for different customers, tasks, and orders, and the AI intelligently considers them in the work schedule. You can favor key customers, plan urgent or time-consuming tasks as a priority, and efficiently resolve conflicts between priorities.
SkyPlanner’s dynamic prioritization brings flexibility to multi-level priority management. This means you can also highlight different priorities against each other, ensuring that the most important ones are given the highest priority over others.
Material-Driven Production Scheduling
Material-driven production scheduling ensures that your production schedule is fully synchronized with your warehouse material situation. The AI considers purchase orders, anticipated arrival times of materials, resources reserved and consumed by other orders, and the arrival of materials in the warehouse.
This allows the AI to calculate cumulative material balances and optimally schedule work to make the required elements available at just the right time. This reduces delays and improves the efficiency of your production.
Alternative workstations
The AI considers in the job scheduling that they can alternatively be performed at multiple different workstations. You can specify per product for work steps what resource can perform it. The AI selects the most suitable workstation from your options for completing the work, given the production situation.
You can also specify efficiency coefficients for workstations, which the AI considers when selecting a workstation. This feature allows all resources in your production to be utilized as efficiently as possible.
Running Time Lock
The Running Time Lock secures your production plan’s upcoming work to prevent last-minute alterations. For example, you can set the Running Time Lock for the next four hours, during which the scheduled tasks within that timeframe will remain fixed and won’t be changed, moved, or switched.
This helps your production staff focus on their work and avoid quick directional changes in your production. The Running Time Lock is a feature that is under your control.
Order Scheduling Directions
Order scheduling directions allow you to choose how jobs are scheduled: from the present moment forward or the delivery date backward.
When choosing from the present moment forward, jobs are scheduled to start as soon as possible and continue until completion. This can be useful if you want to start production as soon as capacity and material are available. You can also manually specify the earliest allowed timing for an order. Choosing from the delivery date backward means that jobs are scheduled to be completed just before the delivery date. This minimizes the time finished products stand in your warehouse waiting for delivery.
The AI considers these directions when performing scheduling, ensuring that jobs are planned in the most appropriate way given your needs.
Optimization of Setup and Settling Times
With the optimization of setup and settling times, you can define and manage setup and settling times for different work phases.
Setup time is the duration required for a machine to prepare before starting a job, such as job preparation or changing a tool on the production machine. Settling time is the duration that must pass after a job before the next work phase can begin, like paint drying or internal logistics.
The AI takes into account both setup and settling times when scheduling production. This means that a precise timetable can be given for each job and machine, minimizing production interruptions and maximizing machine utilization.
Bulldozer
The bulldozer operates by pushing unstarted tasks forward so they don’t end up in the past if a workstation is lagging behind its objectives. This ensures you never have uncompleted tasks scheduled in the past but only in the future, as it should be. The bulldozer also takes into account the relationships between assignments and their sequence of phases.
It can also preserve the original phase sequence and priorities, even when work queues move at different rates on different workstations’ timelines. This allows for smooth and planned progression in complex and multi-stage production processes. The bulldozer is an excellent tool when you want to maintain the order and strategic planning of your production line in changing conditions.
Tool Optimization
Some jobs may require a workstation and a specific tool, such as a mold. The same tool can’t be in two places at the same time. In SkyPlanner, you can manage tools and specify the products and workstations related to them. AI optimizes the use of tools in your production schedule.
You can also manage tool breakdowns and maintenance, which are also considered in your production plan.
Process Step Completion Degree
The process step completion degree is an intelligent feature of the SkyPlanner application that allows the next production step to begin when the preceding step has reached a certain degree of completion.
For example, the packaging process can begin when the previous step, like assembly, is 10% complete. This boosts the entire production process, reduces downtime, and enables optimal resource use.
Subcontractor scheduling
Subcontractor scheduling allows you to integrate subcontractors into your production process in SkyPlanner. Subcontractors act as if they are their own workstations, and several tasks can be allocated to them simultaneously.
This means that you can plan and monitor the workload of subcontractors directly in SkyPlanner, making cooperation with them more efficient and flexible. This feature enhances the overall production flow and promotes optimal resource utilization.
Batch Job Scheduling
Batch jobs are the ones that involve the simultaneous production of the work stages of several different orders. This is often related to the fact that parts for several orders are simultaneously produced from the same material.
For example, a laser cutter may cut parts from the same sheet for several orders using the same sheet, or a painter may paint parts in the same color.
In SkyPlanner, you can manage assembly jobs, and the AI schedules them optimally in your production plan.
Efficiency Coefficients
SkyPlanner’s efficiency coefficients offer a tool that allows you to adjust the performance of different workstations or workers to match actual work conditions.
Likewise, you can account for differences in efficiency between shifts, such as different efficiency coefficients for morning and evening shifts. Efficiency coefficients consider that not all workstations or workers perform tasks at the same speed. You can specify how fast different workstations or workers complete tasks relative to each other or in different shifts.
For example, if the same welding job takes one worker half an hour in the morning shift and an hour in the evening shift, SkyPlanner can consider this difference in production scheduling. Efficiency coefficients help you plan and schedule work more realistically, improving your production’s efficiency and accuracy at the same time.
Locking Tasks on the Timeline
You can lock a task or order to a specific time, prohibiting the AI from moving that particular job. SkyPlanner’s principle is that you have complete control over the AI’s actions.
Real-Time Production Monitoring
You can see the real-time status of your production from SkyPlanner’s timeline. The color of the work changes when it starts at a workstation, and you also notice any breaks that occur during the task.
All of this is also stored in SkyPlanner’s database, which helps it predict the lead times of your products’ work phases based on history.
Sales Prospect Scheduling
The AI simulates realistic delivery dates for upcoming orders for your sales team. You can use prospect load when considering the delivery time to promise to a potential customer.
Prospects are scheduled like actual tasks, and capacity is reserved for them. This greatly facilitates communication between the sales team and production and keeps your customers satisfied.