Creating production schedule in Project

John-project ,

Looking into your encouragement and help to find a suitable solution, I need to provide detailed response. Please bear with my long post below:

Application

We are a wire making company, draw metal wire and coat it with variety of materials. There are many grades and variety of product depending construction, wire size, jacket color and so on. Orders comes in varied volume sometimes in small qty which will take few hours if planned for that independent order and some are large orders scheduled for distributed dispatches.

We follow make to order as well as make to stock. At times enquiries can be lost if don’t take up the order into production quickly, so lead times are short.

Typically, each product has 2 to 10 process stages, and machines may have size change, color change like set up requirements.

Requirements/ desires

Complete visibility of each sales order/line item from plan to pack, expected completion dates, fitting in expedite orders, accepting new orders and fitting in, visualizing bill of material availability

Solutions tested

It was a small scale making unit, so far we could manage by ad-hoc manual/excel mix planning without any special format as such. But now things cannot be managed that way. We have searched and found advanced solutions such as Siemens opcenter, that looks to be quite promising but highly expensive, and also other part of systems are also not fully evolved to fully utilize such advanced solution.

I am a Power BI advanced user of last several years, so I could make visualizations to track pending orders, with live each stage status. Now we are in the situation to finally find a suitable yet simple scheduling system. I could partially build an excel sheet using solver which can suggest ideal schedule but it’s not complete, and I am afraid that it is so much manual that at shop floor it may not be used on regular basis.

Last 3 days, I tried Project professional, initial learning curve is too steep up to the level just to understand how many type of products are available for project scheduling by Microsoft, that even after my experience of similar environment about Power BI desktop for development and then publishing it in service. As of now my understanding is Project professional is full-fledged application and I think I need that, but I am not clear what are exact steps to make schedules visually available to shop floor, would it be additional inclusion of Project 3, PWA etc?

Anyway, yesterday I explored Project professional a lot to learn it to operate and I feel it has most features which we need, its user friendly, I need advice on customizing it for application of production scheduling?

Some of open questions:

1. Like each product have multiple stages, and multiple time orders of same materials will come, and ill go to same set of machines, so can we have all kind of machines, product masters in Project created to just use them again and again?
2. I am not sure if we can show available inventory of raw materials on the scheduled items?
3. Will it be one Big project and we keep adding each day/ week new orders to that update the schedule?
4. Incase we level the schedule, would we be able to preserve already planned orders in existing state, so can we lock the schedule up to a certain stage and level thereafter?
5. What you would advise after going through the application I elaborate above, Project professional is enough as a tool, or do I need Project 3 as well or I need combination of MS-excel with Project professional, or Just excel is simple enough?

I provide sample data for an order:

Request you to kindly advise. Thank you so much for your kind attention.