Hi All,

     One of our group businesses has been grappling with APB for a few years, unable to produce a realistic, reliable schedule, at least not without significant manual rework. 

The ability of APB to function in our environment has been called into question, i.e. can it ever be made to work? And I have been tasked with finding a customer, in a similar industry / use case, willing to talk to us, to try and answer that question.

A brief outline of our business:-

A provider of engineering services; predominantly offering a make-to-print service for high-complexity, low-volume part production requiring CNC machining and grinding processes to produce. This results in a Job Shop environment configured to deal with a high-variety of products mainly seeing strangers, with few repeaters or runners. Stats:- 7.5 operations per routing (mean), 995 open shop orders, 517 unique parts across those orders, and a median lot size of 2 off. The business has recently moved to IFS Cloud after running Apps 9 and 10 for the previous 6 years.

In parallel, we are focussing on the quality of data (and processes generating that data) being fed into APB, in an effort to reduce the number of unscheduled operations, and quality of schedule generated.

Any offers of help, feedback or sharing of experiences would be much appreciated.

Thanks and regards, Neil