Planning production forecasting for manufacturing SME: an application based on AutoSched™ tool.

Advanced technology base, able to manage different singleness in a proper way, necessity to optimize the chain of the global production process, modular and flexible architecture for planning production activities and easy functionality, has been the main objectives of the developed job. A SME implementation, in order to face the complexity of the today emergent thematic, needing for a modern management of the production and the distribution, that cannot be resolved if the firm doesn't have a suitable informative system. Also in this case, unless the firm doesn’t develop an own production planning tool, the use of commercial tools isn’t so easy as looks; informative systems, especially in SME, don’t match commercial tools requirements and for data and for file format. Authors implemented an architecture, based on the well known AutoSimulations™ tools (AutoSched™) able to get requested data from generic informative system database (i.e. Microsoft SQL Server) by using a very simple to use Visual Basic Interface. This general architecture can be customized very easily and quickly for many others informative systems (database side) while the planning side remains equal in terms of input and output results.