Contract Manufacturing Scheduling Software: Every Customer on One Live Plan

A contract manufacturer sells capacity. Every customer's order competes for the same machines and people, and every change for one customer changes the plan for the rest.

• Due dates move. Customers pull orders in, push them out and split releases. Each change ripples through everyone else's work.
• Priority goes to whoever called last. Without a shared plan, the loudest customer wins and nobody can see what that cost the others.
• Processes are mixed. One program is machined parts, the next is a weldment, the next is a kitted assembly. Each uses different work centers and skills.
• Assembly waits on everything. An assembly can't start until the last component is done, so a single late part holds the whole order.
• The plan lives in one person's head. When the planner who knows every customer is out, the schedule stops.

1. Connect. Skody reads orders, routings and due dates from your ERP. Live integrations: ProShop, Fulcrum and JobBOSS². Acumatica and SYSPRO integrations are also listed on skody.ai.
2. One finite plan. Every customer's work is scheduled against the same machines and shifts, plus operator skills on the Plant & Enterprise plan. There is one set of dates, not a spreadsheet per account.
3. Change a date, recompute the shop. When a customer moves a due date, update it in the ERP. Skody recomputes the whole shop from current ERP and floor state with the same logic every time.
4. See the trade-off. Late-job visibility shows which orders slip after a change, and the bottleneck map shows where. The planner decides what to protect, and the plan follows.
5. Fewer setups across customers. Setup families group similar work from different customers, so the shop doesn't pay for the same changeover twice in a day.

Contract shops rarely run one process. Skody models each work center (CNC, manual machines, fabrication stations, finishing, outside processing and assembly benches) with its own capacity and shifts; on the Plant & Enterprise plan it also schedules people by skill alongside the machines. An assembly operation waits for its components, so the plan never shows a kit starting before its parts exist. When one component runs late, the assembly and everything that depends on it move with it.

A new customer program changes the load for every existing customer. Before you sign, run a capable to promise (CTP) check: add the new work as a what-if scenario, even before it exists in the ERP, and compare it with the current plan: which orders move, which work center becomes the bottleneck, and whether an extra shift or an alternate work center fixes it. The capacity forecast shows whether the next weeks can absorb it.

Published Skody customers use the same approach. Yeager Manufacturing runs what-if scenarios on live ERP data in its scheduling meetings. Three Sigma Manufacturing extended its planning horizon from one week to one year, and its planner accepts the computed baseline about 99% of days.

Vendor capabilities change. Verify critical requirements with each vendor on your own orders.

• You want quote simulation on a one-time license. User Solutions says EDGEBIC runs a prospective order through the same finite model as the live schedule without changing it, and sells EDGEBIC at $25,000 or $35,000 as an installed Windows application.
• Your ERP's scheduler already holds. If the plan you publish in the morning still holds through the day and priority changes are rare, you don't need another system.
• You need MRP, inventory and purchasing in the scheduling tool. That's what EDGEBIC Complete adds. Skody keeps those in your ERP.
• You can't wait for a new ERP connection. Skody connects to any ERP, but one we haven't connected yet typically takes about 3 weeks after you sign. If you need to start sooner, an import-based scheduler may be the practical choice.

• Shop plan: starts at $1,500 per month, month-to-month. Includes machine capacity scheduling, finite-capacity scheduling, automatic conflict resolution, due-date-first optimization, ERP integration, delivery-risk and late-job visibility, planner overrides and what-if scenarios, and production dashboards.
• Plant & Enterprise plan: custom pricing based on scope. Adds workforce capacity scheduling, skills and personnel availability constraints, machine and workforce optimization, pallet pool and multi-part scheduling, lights-out production planning, MES and machine telemetry integration, multi-department and multi-site deployment, and advanced integrations.
• Pricing is per shop, not per user. There is no free trial; Shop plans are month-to-month instead.
• Every deployment is hosted in ITAR-ready Gov Cloud. SOC 2 Type II.

See pricing.