DTR Software: Plastics-specific Manufacturing

Here you will find information on DTR Plastics software's scheduling, quoting, bill of manufacture (BOM), material requirements planning (MRP), purchasing and forecasting functionality.

Production Scheduling

DTR Plastics software features a robust drag and drop scheduling control center. Your production scheduler can generate forward finite, queued, and just-in-time scheduling for all your workstations and secondary operations. In fact, it’s easy to schedule all your jobs, at all levels, on just one screen. Within the scheduling control center, you can instantly see where sub-component and assembly jobs are scheduled and identify late jobs, material shortages, and available stations and tools. Production schedules can be based on sales orders, forecasts, release orders (EDI), manual assignments, consolidations and/or reorder points. This helps to maximize machine utilization and efficiently determine production schedules.

If you choose to reschedule a job on a different date or move it to another workstation, the scheduling control center will automatically reschedule all associated lower level jobs to help you meet your shipping dates. In addition, scheduling helps you gain visibility into machine setup and tear down times, preventative maintenance, tooling, and raw material shortages.

With the graphical scheduling application, your employees can analyze raw materials, for each job, at each plant location. Based on color codes, it’s easy to display all demand, identify shortages, and classify jobs with no material problems. Your scheduler can click on any job to view item breakdowns including raw materials and work in process required for each job, availability of materials by plant location, sales orders/jobs and jobs created from minimum/maximum levels. Production has additional visibility into outstanding purchase orders and can determine if orders will be on time or late while plant managers can quickly see which materials to pull to the shop floor by shift. The DTR Plastics software scheduling application can help you:

• Schedule all your jobs, at all levels, on just one screen.
• Identify potential late jobs, raw material shortages, and available stations and tools.
• Identify where raw material are used in production.
• Reschedule a job and DTR Plastics software will automatically reschedule all associated lower level jobs to help you meet your shipping dates.
• Save and recall multiple scenarios.
• Schedule by multiple plant locations, departments and multi-tool stations.
• Plan for tool setups, family molds and tool conflict resolution.
• Consider set-up and tear-down times as well as preventative maintenance.
• Share data with Forecasting and MRP.

Product Quotes

Increase the productivity and accuracy of your estimators and engineers by giving them the ability to make quick and accurate price quotes and/or pricing revisions. With DTR Plastics software, you can:

• Generate unlimited quotes per customer.
• Customize automatic quote letters and quote reports.
• Create items in inventory and bill of manufacture—reducing data entry.
• Run extensive "what-if" quoting scenarios.
• Store and regenerate quotes to quickly develop other quotations with “same as except” capabilities.

DTR Plastics software makes it easy for your team to quickly re-quote your BOMs when receiving additional orders for the same product. The end result is faster turnaround on quotes and accurate data for managing and comparing cost performance. Your employees will have the power to:

• Selectively update quote prices within the quotation system or use DTR Plastics software’s mass update programs.
• Base re-quotes on material price changes, changes in overhead, labor, or machine rates.
• Recalculate all quotes with a substitute raw material, running on a particular press, etc.
• Re-quote with actual or standard costs.
• Manage materials price pass through.

Bills of Manufacture

The DTR Plastics software bill of manufacture (BOM) drastically reduces data entry by integrating directly into quoting. Using the BOM feature, you can accurately establish production standards and project item costs (for each plant location). Cost calculations take into account materials, purge, labor, overhead, stations, packaging, setup, tooling, sub-contracting, and warehousing. The plastics-specific capabilities of the DTR Plastics software BOM application will help you:

• Account for regrind, scrap and purge and return of regrind to inventory within your costing model.
• Track different costing at individual plant locations using multiple BOMs.
• Perform alternate routings.
• Generate up to five product configurations (quantity, run rate, scraps percentages, etc.) per BOM.
• Manage family and multi-cavity tools.
• Link process notes, Q.C. notes, and system notes.
• Route sheets and process setup sheets.
• Designate machine assignments for scheduling.
• Create quantity price break tables with margins automatically from the BOM.
• Attach documents and drawings.
• Graph costs.
• View all BOM components in tree format.
• Manage BOMs easily with utility programs. You can mass copy multi-level BOMs, perform cost-rollups, where used, search and replace, and materials price pass-through.

Material Requirements Planning (MRP)

The MRP application within DTR Plastics software, allows you to project the requirements for all materials based on scheduled production, sales orders, and back orders. MRP helps you to reduce the cost of on-hand inventory while ensuring critical materials are in stock to meet production schedules.

You have the capability to report on inventoried and non-inventoried items, backorders, vendor lead times and blanket purchase order information. In addition, it’s easy to display quantity on-hand, demands for production or sales, outstanding purchase orders and vendor information using the MRP query feature.

Forecasting

The Forecasting module within DTR Plastics software automatically selects the most accurate forecasting method so you can easily calculate quantities for rough cut capacity planning and scheduling. You can generate forecasts by the week, month, quarter and year. Plus, forecast data can be scanned from current sales orders or can be manually entered. Your forecasters can:

• Adjust data to smooth the highs and lows.
• Use batch utility programs to automate the task of collecting large amounts of data.
• Have multiple forecasting tools available such as manual, side-by-side and statistical methods (moving average, double moving average, exponential smoothing, and linear regression).
• Reference unlimited future and historical periods.
• Display sales history and allow for sales history adjustments.
• Perform multiple forecasts on each (or any combination of) item code, plant location, salesperson, territory, customer, and shipping location.
• Forecast a new item with no sales orders.

Rough Cut Planning

DTR Plastics software uses the data from forecasting and bills of manufacture to produce detailed manufacturing information that you can use to create your annual operating plans. You will have the data you need to answer critical planning questions. Your team can turn to the rough cut planning application for:

• Projections on raw material expenditures each month based on sales forecast.
• Reports to see if press capacity will be exceeded.
• Projecting labor requirements by month for each product line.

Production and Process Monitoring

Minimize your data collection chores with real-time production monitoring. You can automate the recording of correct production quantities for each shift and eliminate manual data entry errors.

You can automate the collection of such shop floor information (in real-time) as good items, rejects (and cause of rejects), production hours, efficiencies and downtime by reason. With DTR Plastics software, it’s easy for you to:

• Find out why machines were down or items were rejected in summary or drill-down to details per shift.
• Identify machine status using a color coded display system.
• Quickly find yield, cycle time or production problems—for the whole floor or for one particular machine.
• Gain visibility over tool conflicts and impending setups.
• Generate standard reports or design your own.
• Create summary reports at the end of each shift.