NexPressForums

[DonFeltner]

Can anyone recommend some really basic, cheap, and simple job scheduling software? Our digital press department is self contained within a much larger printing plant. We do our own prepress, printing, bindery, shipping... rarely does a job need to leave our department unless it gets foil stamped, die cut or some special finishing. The plant uses EFI software for scheduling, but that's overkill for what we need. Currently we just use a large dry erase board and update it as we complete jobs. It works great until we get really busy, or have a lot of proofs out, the board just fills up. Any help is appreciated.

[zelmo]

Don,
What solution did you end up using?
We built a database in FileMaker Pro. We started in 1996 just because we'd outgrown handwritten work orders and paper tickets and needed to keep track of the 700 or so jobs in our plant at any given moment. It is great for scheduling, automated communications, and such. We rely heavily on it for virtually everything related to production and estimating, and are in the process of setting it up to drive invoicing.

[DonFeltner]

We are in the process of installing Prism as a replacement for EFI/PSI. And at the same time, we are consolidating our department into the full scheme of things in the plant. Management has decided to schedule our department the same as any other machine in the building, but that's where it stops, our jobs get scheduled for our press, but the finishing/shipping is left up to us to get done on time. So if a job hits the schedule for the NexPress, it's "assumed" that we're doing the finishing/shipping, unless otherwise noted. We also have a separate schedule for online orders through our various distributor websites, automated workflow directs files onto the DFE, the online schedule is accessed via a browser, and is updated in realtime. We'll see how it goes.

[zelmo]

Good luck with that. We have several (4 or 5 right now) other portals through which we receive orders, and getting people into the routine of checking them as frequently as required is a small price for automation. It's always the low volume sites that you lose track of.

Slightly on topic, are you scheduling proofs at all or just press runs? Do you proof on your NP or use a different solution?

[DonFeltner]

We schedule after proof approval only, some jobs only require PDF, the ones that require a press proof come with a flag for proof only. The proof is ran on the NexPress, and customers pay accordingly (we also have other output devices, usually used for proofs going to one of our offset presses). Once the proof is approved, the ASR marks it "proof OK" in the system, that tells scheduling it's ready to schedule, they look at the ticket, and schedule whatever is needed. Scheduling for our department is handled a bit differently. We basically just get a list of what jobs need to be in another department, and when. It's up to the operator to do this as efficient as possible. We still get a lot of jobs that aren't on any schedule, so at the beginning of each shift, and usually somewhere in between, we look at the jobs we have, gang them by stock type, coated/uncoated, etc..