The Advanced Planning Board allows you to perform finite scheduling of shop orders on sites that do not use the Scheduling Server or sites for which the Scheduling Server has been disabled. Unlike the Scheduling Server, however, this finite schedule only considers the constraints placed by shop orders and resources that are actually loaded to the Advanced Planning Board at a given time and not all the shop orders and resources available at the site. It also depends on whether the work centers used for the shop order operations have finite scheduling capacity.
By using the Advanced Planning Board, it is possible for a number of users to schedule the same or overlapping subsets of operations simultaneously. The scheduling process is supported by a graphical representation of operations, material, work centers, tools, calendars, etc. This powerful graphical interface allows you to work with the schedule interactively. You can move the operations and resources along a timeline using drag-and-drop and schedule them to meet your requirements. The changes you make can then be saved back to the database and the changed shop orders will be updated accordingly.
Please note that although you use the Advanced Planning Board to schedule shop orders at a particular site, the shop order infinite scheduler is also active for the same site. Therefore the same subset of shop orders may be scheduled by the infinite scheduler as well as through the Advanced Planning Board. However, only the schedule which was saved last, either by using the infinite scheduler or the Advanced Planning Board, will be valid.
For instance, when you create a shop order it will be scheduled by the infinite scheduler first. This order may subsequently be rescheduled through the Advanced Planning Board. As a result, the schedule created by the infinite scheduler gets replaced. This can happen the other way round as well, when a shop order schedule which was saved using the Advanced Planning Board gets replaced when it is rescheduled using the shop order infinite scheduler. Please note that the infinite scheduler can be run either by using a right mouse button option or automatically due to changes in factors affecting the shop order. Changing the site calendar, for instance, will cause the infinite scheduler to run automatically. Canceling a machine operation or splitting a shop order are also examples of instances when orders may be rescheduled by the shop order infinite scheduler.
Note that the data presented in the Advanced Planning Board is not constantly synchronized with the data in the database. You need to reload data to the Advanced Planning Board to see the latest data from the database at a given time.
As stated previously, shop orders on non-CBS sites can also be scheduled using the shop order infinite scheduler. As the name suggests, it performs infinite scheduling on shop order operations within a site. For more information, see the topic description on Shop Order Infinite Scheduling. Using the Scheduling Server is yet another scheduling method but can only be used on sites that are connected to the Scheduling Server. It is far more powerful and considers constraints existing on the entire site, instead of only those loaded into the Scheduling Client. For more information on the Scheduling Server, see the topic description on Constraint Based Scheduling.