Computer Associates International Inc, Islandia, New York has revamped its manufacturing software offering with the launch of the CA-Quick Response Engine, an object-oriented workstation-based scheduling product for plant managers. The company says traditional manufacturing resource planning systems can’t always respond quickly enough to customer demands. The rush order for a priority customer can highlight inadequate or over-burdened processes – for example, the customer is howling for delivery within five days, but the system takes four days to process an order. The plant manager needs new tools to help planning and resource decisions so that if a rush order is delivered, he can assess what the effects will be on materials, resources, the other orders in the chain, and so forth. Computer Associates says its Quick Response Engine is a tool to enable real time scheduling and rescheduling.
Whole workload
With a Windows-based interface, the user can download information from the main manufacturing system, and see the effects of any rescheduling on the whole workload. He can then make a series of decisions on the local workstation, to see the overall effect on the schedule, for example increasing the workforce on a particular project, or diverting materials to a rush order. The quick response system will then highlight any knock on effect this action would have. If this would leave a bottleneck somewhere, the plant manager can adjust his resource allocation. When a satisfactory outcome has been reached, the user can finalise the plan, and send it back to the main system server, where it will automatically be activated on the main system. The user can personalise menus and business views to reflect his or her daily workload. It could be used by a sales manager to control the workflow of the sales department, prompting him or her with a personalised to do list. The system uses intelligent agents, enabling it to flash warnings to the user relevant to his or her areas of responsibility. CA-Quick Response Engine is available now under Windows and Windows95 for Computer Associates’ AS/400-based manufacturing system CA-PRMS, and will be available for its Unix-based CA-Manman/X in the first quarter of next year. The company could not give prices.
