If you’re evaluating an advanced planning and scheduling solution (APS), here’s what we need at Lucie to understand your operation and how we can help you make better decisions.
Excel has been the right answer for many years because of its flexibility. As a friend would say, “you can fit a piano into an Excel spreadsheet.” The challenge is that evaluating all the combinations when a machine fails, material runs short, or a priority changes still depends on the planner.
1. Understand how you plan today
Number one: we need to understand your current stack. How the planners work, what data they use, where that data lives, and how production flows through the plant.
The first conversation is free. If we move forward, we define the scope of the diagnostic and implementation.
The diagnostic takes place over one or two calls between a Lucie engineer and your planning team. We discuss the rules, objectives, and unexpected situations they need to handle.
With those calls and the documents you share, Lucie’s internal agents classify, label, and map the information to configure the product around your plant.
2. Work with the files you already have
Some of the files that help us are:
- Master data and SKU lists.
- Production routes and rates.
- Capacity, shifts, and staffing per line.
- Customers, orders, and priorities.
- Inventory, materials, and recipes.
And any other file that influences production scheduling. Lucie adapts to your factory’s file and information architecture, not the other way around.
We can start with your current files. If part of your planning lives in the ERP, we identify the information we need. If connectivity is included in the project, we develop the integrations needed to keep that information up to date in Lucie.
3. See Lucie with your information
Once the final diagnostic call is complete and we’ve received the necessary information, we prepare a model of how Lucie would work in your plant within 2 to 3 business days.
The idea is to show your production lines with their configurations, rules, and objectives, so your team can test the model and review the adjustments with us.
4. From the diagnostic to go-live
First, we run the diagnostic and configure the operation. Then your team tests the demo and we make the final adjustments. If the project includes live connectivity with your systems, we work on it in parallel according to the agreed scope.
With the configuration validated and the information available to operate, your team starts using Lucie to plan production. The expected implementation timeline is up to 6 weeks, depending on the agreed scope.
Contact us if you’d like to start with a completely free initial diagnostic.