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Production Planning Software in Solihull

Production planning for Solihull businesses, from CubeERP. UK-built, UK-supported, and configured around your process. Serving Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Coventry too.

Book a walkthroughAbout CubeERP

We support businesses in Solihull the way we would want to be supported ourselves: someone who knows the account, on the end of a phone, and on site when the job needs it.

Solihull is comfortably within a morning’s drive of our Olney office.

A production plan that ignores capacity is a wish list. CubeERP schedules works orders against the work centres, machines, shifts and skills you actually have, so the plan reflects what can be done rather than what would be convenient. Finite and infinite scheduling are both available, because some days you need the achievable plan and other days you need to see how far past it you are. Drag a job, and the knock-on effects show immediately: which orders slip, which customer needs a call, and whether an extra shift or a sub-contract operation would recover it.

  • Finite

    Capacity, or infinite when you need it

  • What-if

    See what a rush job displaces

  • Live

    Sequence on the floor, not on paper

What it does

Inside production planning software

The parts of CubeERP that make up production planning. Everything here shares one database, so nothing needs re-keying between them.

  • Visual scheduling board

    A drag-and-drop schedule by work centre, machine or team, with shift patterns, planned maintenance and holidays taken into account rather than assumed away.

  • Finite and infinite capacity

    Schedule to available capacity to get a realistic promise date, or infinitely to see the size of the overload you are being asked to absorb.

  • Sequence that saves set-up

    Group by material, colour, tooling or size to cut changeovers, with sequencing rules per work centre rather than a single global assumption.

  • Bottlenecks before they bite

    Load by work centre and period, showing where the constraint actually is this week - which is frequently not where everybody assumes it is.

  • What-if a rush job

    Drop a hypothetical order into the plan and see exactly what it displaces before you agree to it, so an expedite is a commercial decision rather than a surprise.

  • Promise dates you can defend

    Available-to-promise and capable-to-promise dates fed straight back into quoting and order entry, so sales stops guessing and operations stops absorbing the guess.

In practice

Problems this actually solves

Anonymised, but not invented. These are the situations businesses describe to us before they change anything.

  • Every order marked urgent

    The situation

    A jobbing shop had a priority list where two-thirds of the jobs were flagged urgent. The real sequence was decided each morning by whoever shouted loudest, and set-up time was enormous.

    What changed

    A single scheduled sequence, visible to sales and the floor, replaced the shouting. Grouping by tooling cut changeovers substantially and on-time delivery improved without any new equipment.

  • The bottleneck that had moved

    The situation

    Investment was being planned for the machining cell, which everybody knew was the constraint. It had been, three years earlier; the actual constraint had since moved to finishing.

    What changed

    Load reporting by work centre showed where the queue really was. A far cheaper change in finishing released more throughput than the machining investment would have.

  • Rush jobs with invisible cost

    The situation

    Rush orders were accepted routinely because nobody could show what they displaced. Regular customers were quietly late, and the cause was never attributed.

    What changed

    What-if scheduling makes the trade-off explicit at the point of acceptance. Rush work is still taken - but now it is priced for what it actually costs.

Local coverage

Production planning across West Midlands

We cover Solihull and the surrounding area, including Town Centre, Shirley, Dorridge, Knowle and Blythe Valley Business Park, across the B90, B91, B92 and B93 postcode districts. We also work with businesses in Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Coventry and Dudley and elsewhere in West Midlands.

Postcode districts

  • B90
  • B91
  • B92
  • B93
  • B94

Areas we cover

Town Centre, Shirley, Dorridge, Knowle, Blythe Valley Business Park, Birmingham Business Park, Monkspath and Dickens Heath.

Getting to you

Roughly49miles from our Olney office

Discovery, training and go-live are done on site as standard - not because it looks good on a proposal, but because most of what a system needs to know is learned in the building.

Production planning elsewhere in West Midlands

All of West Midlands

How it happens

What implementation actually involves

The same process wherever you are, and for Solihull it is done in person.

  1. 1

    Discovery

    A structured session mapping how you work now - the systems, the spreadsheets and the bits held together by one person’s memory. We come back with what the platform covers as standard, what needs configuration, and what needs building.

  2. 2

    Configuration

    Your sites, warehouses, price lists, approval limits, document templates, workflows and permissions set up to match the business - not a demo tenant with your logo dropped on it.

  3. 3

    Data migration

    Customers, suppliers, parts, bills of materials, price lists, open orders and stock balances brought across and reconciled. We migrate, you check the numbers against the old system, and only then do we cut over.

  4. 4

    Training & rollout

    Role-based training so the order desk learns the order desk and the warehouse learns the warehouse, with a pilot group first where it makes sense. Documentation and short screen recordings left behind for new starters.

  5. 5

    Ongoing support

    UK support from the people who built the platform, with a named contact, agreed response times, and a product roadmap you can influence.

You might call it something else

Production planning goes by a lot of names - if you are searching for any of these, this is the page you wanted.

Production scheduling softwareCapacity planning softwareFinite capacity schedulingFactory scheduling systemShop floor scheduling software

Questions

The things people ask first

Not on the list?01234 672 617hello@cubeerp.co.uk

  • It covers what most SME manufacturers need from advanced planning and scheduling: finite capacity, sequencing rules, constraints and what-if. If you need optimisation across dozens of plants, tell us in discovery and we will say plainly if we are not the right fit.

  • From the routing initially, then from actual booked times. Standards that consistently differ from reality are highlighted so they can be corrected rather than silently absorbed into the plan.

  • Yes. Work centres can be constrained by skilled operators as well as equipment, with shift patterns, absence and skills matrices taken into account.

  • Yes - the sequence appears on shop-floor terminals and boards, updating when the plan changes. Printed schedules go stale the moment they leave the printer, which is why the floor stops believing them.

  • MRP decides what to make and buy and by when. Production planning decides whether it can actually be made in that order with the capacity you have. Both run on the same data, so they cannot contradict each other.

Related

Other things we can put right

Also available in Solihull.

Part of a bigger system

Production planning is one part of CubeERP. You can start here and switch the rest on later - it is the same system, not a separate purchase bolted on.

Explore the platform

Working in Solihull?

Production planning for your Solihull business

Tell us what your current system does badly. We will tell you whether CubeERP fixes it, and what it would take.

Start a conversationCall 01234 672 617