Fulcrum Scheduling: Keep Fulcrum, Fix the Schedule

Fulcrum is a cloud ERP, MRP and MES for job shops and discrete manufacturers, and its scheduling is better than most ERPs'. Fulcrum describes its Autoschedule as:

• Finite: work is placed using shifts, equipment, operations and material availability.
• Automatic: the schedule recalculates as new orders arrive and priorities change.
• Hybrid: drag-and-drop changes inside a near-term freeze window, with everything further out still auto-scheduled.
• Connected: progress from the Job Tracker feeds the schedule.

If that plan holds on your floor, you don't need Skody.

The difference shows up after 9 a.m., not in the demo. When a machine goes down, a qualified operator calls out or an expedite lands, someone still has to decide what the rest of the shop does now:

• Is the recalculated plan actually runnable with the people on shift today?
• Which jobs move inside the freeze window, and who runs them?
• Which due dates are now at risk, and what would fix them: overtime, another qualified operator, earlier material?

In many shops that someone is still the planner, working in the near term by hand. That's the gap Skody fills.

1. Connect. Skody reads jobs, routings and work centers from Fulcrum and can write schedule dates back, depending on how your shop wants to run it.
2. Model. Map your real shop constraints: machines, shifts, setups and outside processing, plus individual operators and their skills, workforce and pallets on the Plant & Enterprise plan.
3. Compute. Skody resolves conflicts automatically and produces an executable baseline, optimized first for due dates and then for throughput.
4. Recompute. After a disruption, Skody recomputes the whole shop in under a minute and proposes the decision: which jobs move, which machine and which person run them, and which due dates are now at risk. The planner reviews, accepts or overrides.
5. Keep Fulcrum as the system of record. Quotes, jobs, purchasing, inventory and accounting stay in Fulcrum.

Fulcrum stays the ERP. Skody is the production decision layer above it.

Be honest about whether you need another system. Fulcrum's Autoschedule is probably enough if:

• The plan it produces still holds through the day.
• Your planner isn't overriding the freeze window by hand after every disruption.
• Machine and equipment capacity is the constraint, not which qualified person is free to run the job.
• You aren't regularly asking "what if we added one more qualified operator on this machine?"

Skody is worth evaluating when the opposite is true.

Run the same disruption through both:

1. Load yesterday's real jobs.
2. Take one machine down mid-shift and mark one qualified operator absent.
3. Compare what each system proposes: which jobs move, who runs them, which due dates are now at risk.
4. Count how much the planner had to fix by hand before the plan was runnable.

Whatever you're evaluating, ask each vendor to show you this on your data, not on demo data.

• Skody starts at $1,500 per month on the Shop plan (month-to-month); Plant & Enterprise has custom pricing based on scope.
• Implementation is measured in weeks, not an ERP migration.
• Deployment: cloud, ITAR-ready Gov Cloud, SOC 2 Type II.
• Fulcrum connection: live. Skody reads jobs, routings and work centers from Fulcrum and can write schedule dates back, depending on how your shop wants to run it. Fulcrum stays the system of record.