Finite and Infinite Scheduling

MIE Solutions offers a made to order job shop ERP system designed for the manufacturer of goods and products.  MIE Trak is a full featured ERP system for the made to order and engineer to order manufacturer.

ERP software used for manufacturing planning and scheduling systems must consider capacity leveling.   Capacity leveling is basically done in one of the two main flavors of scheduling.

• Finite Schedule
• Infinite Scheduling

Each of these two flavors of scheduling of jobs have many variations but the general rule of thumb is true.

Finite scheduling is where jobs are scheduled according to the limitation of resources and capacity found in the production environment.   Scheduling processes that take into account a set of finite resources is basically a finite scheduling process.

Infinite scheduling is where jobs a scheduling not according to the limitation of the finite resource, but the scheduling process schedules making the assumption no other activity is using the finite resources.  I like to think of infinite scheduling as a system where there are no other jobs or activities being scheduled except the single job or activity.   Infinite scheduling basically ignores all existing and future resource loads that have occurred or will be occurring.

For a variety of reasons, some manufacturers prefer to schedule jobs according to the limitation of resources and in other situations they prefer to schedule outside the resource limitation.  Both infinite and backwards scheduling take into account material, labor, outside processes and child dependencies (in the case of assemblies) during the scheduling process.  The only part of the scheduling system that is finite or infinite is the labor resource portion and not the material.

MIE Trak has an advanced scheduling system which includes both finite and infinite scheduling.  MIE Trak is designed for most any type of job shop include made to order and engineer to order production organizations. You can visit the website at http://www.mie-solutions.com