The Production Planner module addresses the challenge of scheduling manufacturing operations on the shop floor. In pharmaceutical and batch manufacturing environments, production planning involves coordinating equipment, materials, personnel, and regulatory constraints while meeting delivery commitments.
PLAIO’s Production Planner provides visual, constraint-aware scheduling that gives planners direct control over production sequencing while maintaining visibility into the downstream effects of scheduling decisions.
Production Campaigns
Production campaigns are groupings of similar production jobs scheduled consecutively on the same manufacturing line to minimize changeovers, reduce setup and cleaning time, and improve efficiency.
Key characteristics:
Grouped by similarity: Jobs in a campaign typically share the same molecule, product family, strength, or formulation to reduce cleaning and changeover requirements
Sequential execution: Orders are placed and sequenced within a defined campaign window on a specific resource
Efficiency driver: Campaigns reduce downtime between jobs by batching similar products together, minimizing the need for extensive line cleaning or equipment reconfiguration.
How to manage your shop floor
Create campaigns: You can create, edit, and delete campaigns directly in the Production Planner tab.
Manage campaigns: Campaigns group similar production jobs by shared constraints like product family or strength to reduce changeovers. Production schedules are displayed through interactive Gantt charts where planners can see operations, resource assignments, and timing across production lines. The visual interface supports:
Drag-and-drop scheduling: Move production jobs between time slots and resources.
Duration adjustment: Extend or compress job durations based on actual conditions.
Sequence modification: Reorder jobs to optimize changeover times or meet priority requirements.
Resource visualization: See equipment availability, maintenance windows, and capacity utilization.
Quick Scheduler: Jobs can be automatically placed into campaigns based on product families, due dates, or other constraints. This creates an initial schedule that you can then manually adjust. You can also adjust jobs accordingly:
Assign jobs to qualified campaigns
Move jobs between campaigns
Delete jobs from campaigns
View campaign utilization, changeover, and cleaning KPIs
Configure changeover times, cleaning times, and resource downtime
Changeover, Setup, and Cleaning:
Setup time - occurs before processing, configured per item/resource
Cleaning time - occurs after processing
Changeover time - configured when changing from one item to another
Downtimes:
Single model for any time a machine cannot be used (excluding normal setup/cleaning)
Supports both resource-level and floor-level downtimes
Can represent maintenance, shutdowns, or other unavailability
You can add downtime reasons (needed for KPIs)
Shifts: The system supports configurable shift patterns including double and triple shifts.
Account for human resources and shift scheduling
Shift scheduling is supported.
Shift capabilities:
Configure shifts per resource or production floor
Set working days and working hours
Create temporary shift overrides for specific periods
Support for single, double, and triple shift patterns