The Shop Advisor: Guided Setup and the Tuning Cockpit
Finite scheduling has settings for the same reason every APS product does: when capacity is tight, something has to give — a due date slips, work runs into overtime, the plan churns, or everything crams in early — and which one gives first is a real business decision your shop already has an instinct for, even if you’ve never had to name it. The Shop Advisor turns that instinct into the six weights the finite scheduler’s objective actually minimizes, without requiring you to know what an objective weight is.
The 2-minute wizard
Run Guided Finite Setup from the APS Setup page, or open it directly from the Scheduler. Seven questions across six steps, plain language, no scheduling jargon:
- How does work arrive in your shop — made to order, made to stock, or mixed?
- If an order ships late, what happens?
- Once a plan is on the floor, how painful is changing it?
- Can work run outside normal shift hours?
- How painful are changeovers or setups between different products?
- Two closing questions in one step: whether your shop has a known bottleneck work center (and which one, if so), and roughly how many operations your shop runs — small, medium, or large.
Each answer maps to one or more of the tuning dials below — question 2 sets how hard the solver fights to hit due dates, question 3 sets how much it resists disturbing an already-published plan, question 4 sets how strictly it respects shift boundaries, and so on. At the end, you get a named preset, a value for every dial, and a plain-English reason for each one — generated deterministically from your answers, not invented by the wizard on the spot, so the same answers always produce the same recommendation.
The six dials
| Dial | What it actually does |
|---|---|
| Hit due dates | How hard the solver fights to finish orders on time. |
| Keep the plan stable | How strongly operations stay near where they were already planned, instead of drifting earlier. |
| Hold anchors | How firmly in-flight work and pinned operations hold their position. |
| Respect shift hours | How strongly the solver keeps work inside your open shift windows. |
| Finish early | Compresses the overall schedule span — read this as “finish sooner,” not as balancing load evenly across machines; those are different things. |
| Changeovers | How strongly the solver avoids sequence-dependent setup — today, this weight is recorded and reported but not yet minimized by the finite solver itself. It activates automatically the moment changeover-aware finite scheduling ships; nothing about your setting changes when it does. Until then, use Sequence Optimization for changeover reduction — it’s a separate, working tool for exactly that job. |
Every dial you set is saved immediately; you don’t need to re-run the wizard to adjust one later.
Reading your recommendation
The wizard’s last screen doesn’t just hand you six numbers — it names the preset your answers landed on and gives a plain-English reason for each dial’s value, tied back to the specific question that set it. If a recommendation doesn’t feel right for your shop, that’s useful information too: it usually means one of your answers was a closer call than the wizard’s phrasing let on, and it’s worth re-running the wizard and picking the other option to see how the recommendation shifts before you commit to either one. Nothing about running it twice costs you anything — the previous profile isn’t lost until you actually save over it.
The always-visible cockpit
Once you’ve tuned the scheduler, a compact strip stays visible showing which preset you’re on and whether you’ve drifted from it, plus two quick-reference rows: one showing facts the Advisor already detected about your shop (work center count, which ones have multiple machines, whether changeover data exists, whether efficiency varies by resource), and one showing your policy choices (solve time limit, frozen horizon length, planning window). Tune… reopens the wizard; Reset discards any unsaved dial edits and reloads what you last saved.
What the “Coming” tiles are
Alongside the six live dials, the cockpit shows a row of small tiles for scheduling capabilities that aren’t part of your solve yet — automatic machine selection, labor-constrained scheduling, and so on. Each tile opens a short, plain-English description of what that capability will do once it ships, so growth in what SmartFlow can model lands in a slot you already understand, rather than showing up as an unexplained settings sprawl later. These are genuinely not active today — treat a tile’s description as what’s planned, not as something you can turn on now.
Concepts behind this feature
The four-buckets framing behind this whole design — facts vs. preferences vs. resource-dimension clusters vs. operational policy — is explained in more depth alongside the worked paint-line changeover example in Sequence-Dependent Setup: The Changeover Matrix Explained.