We recenlty moved from make to stock to make to order. With this have come an increased amount of changeovers (as I expected). Can Baan help minimize changeovers by planning like items together? If so...how?

Please explain - like items - in your situation.
Are all items MTO?

YEs, all items are MTO.

Lets say I make item A,B,C,D,E,F,G

Items A,B and C are all similar products, except for minor differences in packaging. They do not require changeovers when swithing among item

Items D,E and F are all similar products, except for minor differences in packaging. They do not require changeovers when swithing among items

Item G is totally unique.

Lets say I have demand for all of the items during a given week. I am looking for something which will plan items A,B and C together, and then D, E and F together, and then item G alone, so I dont have to run, for example, item A, then switch to item G, then switch back to item C, then switch to item F etc

What version are you on?

baan50.b

You might want to look at cyclic planning. Normally used for repetitive items so I don't know what the effect will be on MTO items.
You allso might want to look at why you have all your items as MTO. If you have your safety stock at 0 in MTS you get the same effect but loose the tracking per order on the lower items in the BOM.

Bryan,

Your question reflects a typical situation when a company switches from MTS to MTO, in the sense that manufacturing lead times need to be reduced in order to support the transition.

You want to reduce change-over time because you need to reduce your manufacturing lead time.
Manufacturing lead time needs to be reduced in order to meed the promised delivery dates, in order to:
a. Maintain customer satisfaction.
b. Improve your throughput (money flow)

MRP will not do this (not Baan's MRP or any other MRP) per definition!

To reach these goals you need a "smart" planning engine that can:
a. Identify bottlenecks in the manufacturing process because work stations which are not bottlenecks don't need to be scheduled efficiently.
b. Prioritize jobs on the bottleneck stations according to due date.
c. considder change-over dependencies between similar items on bottleneck stations.

If this issue becomes critical in your ability to switch to MTO then I suggest to considder interfacing Baan to an external planning engine, an investment which can be well justified in terms of buttom line benefits to your company.

What other external APS system does Baan interface with..?

Baan has BaanSCS which is supposed to be an APS. It's much better than MRP but has 2 downsides:
1. It is not a true optimization engine because it will not give the best result after one run.
The system handles material capacity separately from shop floor capacity which means that iterative runs need to be executed in order to reach a feasible solution in terms of both material and work. (why compromise again?)
2. BaanSCS works only with B5C.

Alternatively, I don't know of any "plug-and-play" APS systems fom Baan, But I do know of 2 good systems:
1. SWS by Telly systems : http://telly-advanced.com. (don't be discouraged y the quality of the site)
2. STG which belongs to Manugistics: http://www.manugistics.com/solutions/manufacturing_planning_and_scheduling.asp.

Need further assistance?
Please contact royayaa@yahoo.com