ProShop Scheduling: Keep ProShop, Fix the Schedule

ProShop is a respected ERP, MES and quality system for precision shops. Shops that go looking for "ProShop alternatives" are rarely abandoning travelers, inspection or job costing. They are stuck on the schedule.

What that usually looks like on the floor:

• The morning plan is built in ProShop or exported to Excel.
• One machine goes down, an operator is out, material is late, or a hot order lands.
• Cascading changes hit the rest of the day.
• The planner rebuilds sequences by hand and guesses the bottleneck from reports that lag by days or weeks.

That is a scheduling gap, not an ERP gap. Replacing ProShop throws out the system of record to fix the decision layer. Skody is built to keep ProShop and fix the decision layer.

1. Connect. Skody connects to ProShop over API. It reads orders, routings, materials, labor activity and production state.
2. Model. Map real shop constraints: machines, operator skills, shifts, pallets, setups and outside processing.
3. Compute. Skody resolves conflicts automatically and produces an executable baseline optimized first for due dates, then for throughput.
4. Recompute. When conditions change, recompute the whole shop in under a minute with the same decision logic.
5. Keep ProShop as the system of record. Orders, travelers, quality records and costing stay in ProShop. Write-back is available if you want it; in practice every customer runs on read only.

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

Zach Yeager, President of Yeager Manufacturing and a ProShop user running Skody:

Skody has been game changing for us. We used to come into scheduling feeling overwhelmed. There was too much work, and one schedule change would cause a cascading effect. We used to look at reports and guess where our bottlenecks were, but we wouldn't see the results for a couple of weeks.

Now in scheduling we run numerous scenarios in real time. We look at the dashboards Skody provides to see how we might solve the bottleneck. The real power is that in real time, we create a plan with the bottleneck fixed. For instance if we feel like if we had one more person running one of the mills we would be cruising… so we add Mill skills to a random person (usually an office employee just to test) and run a new schedule. Did our delivery date actually improve? If yes, wonderful but if no then we look at where the bottleneck is now and go solve that one. If we brought this material in sooner, would that help? And so on…

Sometimes scheduling goes great, and meetings are quick. Sometimes our backlog is nuts and we might run 8–10 of these scenarios in the hour long scheduling session. However, we come out of it with solid evidence that adding a resource in a specific area on a certain date would improve our OTD.

That is the job: real-time scenarios on live ProShop data, not a weekly guess from lagging reports.

Zimmer Design & Manufacturing in Leander, Texas also runs Skody on ProShop data, with live dashboards on the floor. Read the Zimmer Manufacturing case study.

Be honest about the fork:

• Keep ProShop + add Skody if ProShop is working for quoting, travelers, quality and costing, and the pain is cascading schedule changes, unknown bottlenecks and Excel repair work.
• Replace ProShop if you want a different ERP/MES/QMS stack for reasons unrelated to scheduling (product fit, compliance packaging, accounting model, or a full paperless rebuild elsewhere). In that case compare Fulcrum, JobBOSS², Global Shop Solutions and others as ERP choices, not as scheduling patches.
• Buy a lightweight standalone board if you do not need live ERP sync and a spreadsheet import is enough. That is a different product category from a production decision layer on ProShop.

• Skody starts at $1,000 per month.
• Implementation is measured in weeks, not an ERP migration.
• Deployment: cloud, ITAR-ready Gov Cloud, SOC 2 Type II.
• ProShop connection: API, read and write available; customers use read.