Production planning and OEE for series-production plants
What series production has in common is that the same products repeat, production consists of several steps, machines and lines have to be changed over continually, and work follows a shift pattern. In such an environment much of the efficiency is lost to changeovers, plan changes and unrecorded stops. PlanitExo was made for this. The sectors overlap, so the examples below carry over to one another.
What every series-production plant shares
- Repeating orders and frequent changeovers. Changeovers are separate blocks on the Gantt board, so you see how much time they take, and rearranging the sequence can reduce them.
- Multi-step production. An article's routing consists of production and post-processing steps, each with one or more resources and a cycle time.
- Changing priorities. Squeezing in an urgent order is a drag, and the affected resource is locked while it is being edited.
- Plan and shop floor drifting apart. Operators start and close on a tablet and record stops by category, so the plan and reality live in the same system.
- Measurable efficiency. The four-level, time-based OEE (Production, Changeover, Machine, Total) is visible in real time per machine, per machine group and for the whole plant.
Plastics and chemical industry
In injection-moulding and filling-and-packaging style plants there are typically many changeovers (tool, mould, colour or product changes), and machines work with very different cycle times. In PlanitExo a changeover is a separately plannable block, the cycle time is set per article and resource, and the OEE % per block fine-tunes the planned time.
Food industry
On food lines a product change often involves cleaning, and with a short shelf life the accuracy of the plan matters. Here the Gantt board and the changeover blocks give the overview, and tablet recording shows where the hours go. PlanitExo does not replace quality systems. Pallet and container level identification will be part of the Inventory module planned for the end of 2026.
Component manufacturing
In component manufacturing many articles run through several machining and assembly steps. Step-by-step routing and the “Processing” workflow help each step land on the right resource in the right order, and orders that are only partly scheduled are flagged.
Project-based planning alongside series production
Next to series production almost every plant has project-type tasks: tool or fixture making, investments, maintenance projects. Project-based planning shows them grouped under projects, with fields the administrator defines. It can be used to complement series-production planning, or as standalone planning and tracking.
What PlanitExo is not for
PlanitExo is not an MES or a quality management system: it concentrates on planning, efficiency measurement and shop-floor recording. It works together with your ERP and Factbird and does not replace them. Inventory management and material handling will be the job of the Inventory module planned for the end of 2026, which is not available today. Details: comparison and ERP and Factbird integration.