PLANORA Demo: from your Excel data to an optimized schedule in one click

What if your shop floor schedule built itself?

In most factories, scheduling is done in people’s heads, on a spreadsheet, and with a lot of intuition. No one truly measures the impact of these decisions on overall performance. PLANORA changes the game. One tool, one click: artificial intelligence optimizes your schedule, simulates your shop floor, and delivers visual, actionable results immediately.

Discover in this article how the tool works in practice, step by step.

It all starts with your input data

Input data is organized in simple Excel files. No complex software to configure, no specific interface. You work with what you already know.

Three files are all you need:

• 🔧 Your machines — setup times, breakdown rates (MTBF) and repair times (MTTR)
• 👥 Your operators — availability, skills and versatility
• 📋 Your product routings — operation sequences and cycle times

No modification to your IT system is required. If your data exists in an ERP, it exports directly to these files.

Set the confidence level before launch

Before running the calculation, you adjust two sliders that define the trade-off between speed and accuracy:

• Number of iterations: 5 iterations for a quick overview, more for a robust solution
• Confidence interval: 60% to explore options, 95% to validate a decision

This setting gives you full control over the depth of analysis. A quick exploratory test in minutes, or a complete optimization for a high-stakes decision.

The three phases of PLANORA

Once data is loaded and parameters set, a single click launches the entire process. Behind the scenes, two engines start automatically, then results flow into Power BI.

Phase 1 — Finding the optimum

The OptQuest engine explores the experimental domain. It doesn’t test every possible combination — there would be far too many. It converges intelligently toward a robust solution by exploring thousands of scheduling configurations.

Phase 2 — Industrial simulation

PLANORA injects the best settings found into a complete model of your shop floor, custom-built and adapted to your company’s business rules. Are your flows push, pull, Kanban-driven or DDMRP? Each site has its own logic, and the simulator reproduces it faithfully.

It simulates your manufacturing program and captures all process data: entry and exit times for each machine, waiting times, utilization rates, sequences, delays.

Phase 3 — Results in Power BI

Results flow directly into Power BI, ready to be viewed on the shop floor. Nothing else to do. The report exports in one click to PDF or PowerPoint, directly from a built-in button.

Take it to your steering committee or decision meeting to explain your choices, justify your priorities, and align your teams.

Fitness: PLANORA’s central indicator

The fitness is a single value at the intersection of all model constraints: machines, operators, deadlines, capacity. This is precisely the value the algorithm seeks to minimize to maximize your shop floor’s overall performance.

On its own, this number may not mean much to a new user. But its real power appears when you compare multiple scenarios. It’s the metric that lets you objectively choose between two schedules.

The dashboard: your KPIs at a glance

The dashboard displays the essential indicators of your schedule:

• 📊 Number of work orders on time / late
• 📈 Proportion of WOs met
• ⏱ Total minutes of delay and breakdown by WO

These indicators are provided as examples. Each client can integrate their own KPIs, the ones that truly matter for their business.

And the most telling result: the Gantt chart. Every machine, every operation, every time slot, automatically scheduled by PLANORA. This schedule wasn’t built by hand — it’s the product of optimization.

Explore the demo Power BI report

Navigate this interactive dashboard to discover the indicators generated by PLANORA. Fitness, delays, Gantt, machine load — everything is available in real time.

📄 This dashboard is also exportable to PDF or PowerPoint directly from Power BI.

Multi-scenario analysis: locating the real bottleneck

Once the optimum is found, PLANORA enables multi-scenario analyses. This is where the tool reveals its full strategic power. Here’s a concrete example with 4 scenarios:

Scenario 1 — Nominal situation

60 work orders to produce. A factory running normally. Fitness is 352,000 minutes. The first machine clearly stands out with a load of 138,000 minutes. It sets the pace. This is the starting point.

Scenario 2 — Operator absences

Same WOs, same machines, but 5 operators absent for the entire week. Fitness doubles to 698,000 minutes. The 8th machine jumps from 25,000 to 153,000 minutes. The bottleneck has completely shifted. One week of absences was enough to redistribute the entire flow and block production on a machine that wasn’t the initial problem.

Scenario 3 — Capacity increase

To compensate, capacity is increased: some machines switch to 2×9, others to 3×8, Saturday opening, one additional operator. Fitness drops to 656,000 minutes — better, but the bottleneck remains. The 8th machine gets worse at 160,000 minutes. Upstream machines run faster, but parts pile up in front of the 8th which can’t absorb any more. We sped up upstream production, but only generated more WIP and fed the bottleneck faster. We pulled the wrong levers.

Scenario 4 — Smart rerouting

Same configuration as scenario 3, but this time we route half the WOs from the 8th machine to the 9th, equivalent but with a 20% longer cycle time. Fitness drops to 502,000 minutes. The 8th machine falls from 160,000 to 13,500 minutes. The 9th absorbs the load at 84,500 minutes. No need to invest in more hours or more staff — redistributing the flow was all it took.

What these scenarios demonstrate

The bottleneck is not fixed. It shifts based on constraints: absences, schedule changes, rerouting. Every decision reshuffles the deck.

This is PLANORA’s core value: enabling production managers to explore these scenarios, locate the real bottleneck, and choose the right lever before investing.

And once the right lever is identified? Re-run the optimization in this new framework:

• Exploration guides the decision
• The optimizer confirms the best possible schedule
• The manager decides where to act — the tool shows how

From complexity to clear decisions

Your production managers focus on what truly matters. Your planners can concentrate on one question: how to take on more orders?

PLANORA transforms your production complexity into clear decisions. Identify your bottlenecks, test your hypotheses, optimize your scheduling. All in one tool.