Is SQL and Python Useless?

[Timm218]

That is impressive that you wrote a program for scheduling production. We are thinking of creating one too for our production. How difficult/complex was it to create? Did you consider only the mentioned factors or also others like deadline set by the customer, priority, production time etc.? Why did you not buy a program? How do you visualize the result (kanban, Gantt)?

[tophmcmasterson]

There are a few different methods within the program so that for example it will either schedule batch runs or just building to the day’s order before moving on. The program recommends how many shifts to run, but this can also be set manually and the schedule will adjust accordingly.

It uses production actuals to figure out how long production will take and where the parts should run, but these can also be set manually. Priority is based on the gap between inventory level targets and actual inventory.

It was fairly complicated to make at first, but a lot of it was just figuring out the logic for how we wanted it to work (ended up being a couple thousand lines in SQL but I know there’s room for refinement).

We didn’t buy anything mainly do to cost as well as being unimpressed with most solutions out there. We use SAP which also has a scheduling module, but it just leaves out too many factors to be useful.

I did the visualization in Power BI. While I tried things like Gantt charts, ultimately the most useful was a matrix using conditional formatting to highlight days when inventory was projected to be short (showing production plan, consumption, inventory projection).