Will it move confirmed orders?

Only if you allow it. Confirmed orders default to "do not move", and Auto-Plan plans around them. You can flip the rule per run when a replan is needed.

How configurable is the ranking?

Customer type, item type, MTO vs MTS, priority, due-date risk, and any custom field you carry on the order. You can weight and layer rankings or scope them to a window, and most plants use three or four criteria.

Does Auto-Plan respect the capacity reservation curve?

Yes. Reserved hours stay reserved in every mode. Move to JIT, Move to EPD and Fill idle-times won't consume them, and Auto-plan fully treats them as zero capacity for their horizon. The buffer survives the simulation.

How does Fill idle-times pick which orders to pull forward?

Eligible orders are usually MTS replenishment and stock builders, plus lower-priority MTO work that has its material available. The selection follows the same ranking you set for Auto-plan fully.

Production Planning

uScheduler Production

A production plan you can actually execute.

Most production planning tools draw beautiful Gantts that nobody can act on. In uScheduler Production, every cell on the board is a decision you can make. Drag an order and capacity, tooling, qualifications, sequencing and material availability all update instantly. If something doesn’t fit, you see it right away. Auto-Plan suggests a starting point and the planner fine-tunes it. Nothing changes on the floor until the planner commits. The result is a plan you can show on a screen above the line without explaining, and defend in a sales meeting when somebody asks “when can we ship it?”

Production planning board with orders scheduled across ten machines over three days

Functionalities · 8

Advanced tier

uScheduler Production · Auto-Plan

Four ways to let the system propose.

Auto-Plan has four modes, each for a different planning question. Pull dates in line with sales, push dates to the earliest feasible day, fill idle time on the floor, or rebuild the whole plan against a ranking you control. Every run produces a simulation, and nothing commits until you say so.

Move to JIT

Moves production orders to the dates the demand needs them. If a sales order slips a month, the production order follows by itself, so you don't have to chase it.

Move to EPD

Earliest Production Date. You'd like to make it now, but the materials or capacity aren't ready. The system finds the first day when both are and moves the order there, so the date you give is one you can keep.

Fill idle-times

Spots gaps in the schedule, like a machine quiet on Thursday afternoon or a shift under-loaded next week, and pulls eligible work forward to use them. Stock builders, MTS items and lower-priority orders earn their slot without breaking the plan downstream.

Auto-plan fully

Tell the system how to check capacity and materials, and how to rank your production orders, such as by customer type, item type, make-to-order or make-to-stock, priority or custom fields. It then runs a full simulation, and you decide whether to commit it, tweak it or throw it away.

What you see

A proposal, never a verdict.

A fully automated planner that commits its own choices is a planner that surprises you on Monday. We don’t build that. Every Auto-Plan run produces a simulation next to the current plan, so the planner sees what moved, what slipped and what improved, and chooses what to commit. The skill stays in the room.

Four modes: Move to JIT, Move to EPD, Fill idle-times, Auto-plan fully
Ranking rules: customer type, item type, MTO vs MTS, priority, and your own fields
Every run is a simulation, with no silent commits
Per-planner saved configurations
Works well out of the box, and you can change every parameter

Production planning board showing two weeks of orders across ten machines

When this matters

Signals you'd reach for this.

Sales moves, production doesn’t

A customer pushes out by a month and the production order stays where it was. The mismatch lives in someone’s inbox until shipment week.

Planned dates are too optimistic

When you can’t move an order to its earliest feasible date in one click, the plan stays at the date you wanted, even when the floor can’t hit it.

Idle time goes unused

A quiet Thursday afternoon or an under-loaded shift next week is capacity nobody claimed. Without an explicit step to fill it, that time disappears.

Ranking is in someone’s head

Which customer comes first, which order type to favour, when to prioritise MTS over MTO. These rules live in tribal knowledge until you encode them.

FAQ

The questions everyone asks first.

Still wondering? Ask us directly →

Move to JIT and Move to EPD are near-instant for the affected orders. A full Auto-Plan simulation runs in seconds for a single work centre and under a minute for a typical mid-size plant. Nothing commits until you accept the simulation.

See uScheduler Production in a 30-minute demo.

A real screen-share with someone who built it. No slides.

The uTools suite