Production scheduling software for small manufacturers.

In a lot of small plants, the production schedule lives in a spreadsheet, on a whiteboard, or in the head of one person who has done it for years. It works, until that person is out sick, a rush order lands, or a machine goes down and nobody can see what moves where. Norsoft builds production scheduling software around how your plant actually runs, from Mankato, Minnesota.

Buy first, if it fits

There are good off-the-shelf scheduling products, and if your shop runs a fairly standard flow, one of them is probably faster and cheaper than anything we would build. Try them. Most have free trials, and you will learn a lot about your own process just by seeing what they ask you to enter.

Where they tend to break is the part that makes your shop yours. Changeovers that depend on the previous run. A material that has to cure before the next step. A customer whose orders always jump the line. Setup times that one operator knows and nobody wrote down. When the software has no place for those rules, people keep a spreadsheet next to it, and the spreadsheet becomes the real schedule again.

What the spreadsheet is costing you

The cost rarely shows up as a line item. It shows up as a machine sitting idle because the next job's material was not staged, a late order nobody saw coming, overtime that would not have been needed with a day's notice, and the owner walking the floor to find out what is actually running. It also shows up as risk, because the schedule exists only as long as the person who keeps it.

What we build

A schedule that knows your rules: your machines, your changeovers, your setup times, your priority customers, and what has to happen before what. It connects to where the orders come from and where the material is, so a change in one place updates everywhere. Everyone who needs to see it can, on the floor and in the office, without asking the one person who used to hold it.

If you already run an ERP, we usually build scheduling to sit beside it and read from it rather than replacing it. You own the code and the data when we are done.

A real example

A plastic extrusion manufacturer running three production lines. Scheduling delays and data entered twice were causing downtime. We built a custom ERP and production-scheduling platform that tied orders, inventory and the lines together, and downtime and labor bottlenecks dropped by more than 30%. Read the case study.

How we start

We sit with whoever builds the schedule today and write down the rules they carry in their head, because those rules are the actual product. That alone is usually worth doing, whether you build anything or not. Then we tell you whether an off-the-shelf tool can hold those rules or whether it is worth building.

This is probably you if

• The schedule lives in a spreadsheet, on a whiteboard, or with one person
• You tried scheduling software and people went back to the spreadsheet
• A rush order or a down machine throws off the whole week
• Nobody can say for sure what is running right now without walking the floor

More on the other problems we solve for plants is on our manufacturing page.