Free DBR software – Sorry!
Throughout our TOC careers we have developed and adapted extraordinarily powerful Excel spreadsheets to schedule both simple and complex production environments. The spreadsheets are “bolt-on” to your existing ERP system (if you have one), and one-way; they pull data from a company’s system of record, so that we can produce a DBR schedule. They do not feed data back into the ERP system. That usually generates a sigh of relief from the IT people who are understandably very protective of their system’s integrity.
For a while we recommended 3rd party DBR software in preference to our spreadsheets. 3rd party software is naturally more robust, more feature-filled, and more flexible in many ways. However, vendors who have grown accustomed to working with (and billing) larger companies — $150 MM annual revenues and more — simply didn’t seem to do a good job with smaller clients, like the ones we mostly work with. They don’t recognize that the smaller businesses often need MORE support than the big companies, not less. And that’s a problem when their license fees are aimed at the larger companies, and when they bill the same scale of implementation and support rates for both large and small manufacturers.
So while we’re still entirely open to 3rd party software where circumstances permit, we’ve returned to offering Excel-based solutions to our (smaller) clients when it’s appropriate or necessary. Typically clients with revenues from $2.5 MM to $100 MM. Our “Sweet spot” for these spreadsheets tends to be for companies in the range $2.5MM to $50MM, although we have much larger clients, too.
The justification for companies using our solution varies.
One of these implementations was because the client could not find anything in the 3rd party environment — DBR compliant or otherwise — that would effectively schedule their complex environment. That led to another implementation in the same industry (not a competitor), and we’re discussing a potential 3rd implementation in that industry right now (2021).
Others have been to replace implementations of what we consider to be compliant sDBR and DBR software — good software, but where the client simply didn’t feel there was a “fit.”
We recommend that clients use our spreadsheets as a fully-functional model as a basis for eventually making a very informed selection of a 3rd party packaged software once they have grown familiar with and confident in the DBR model. Or, when justified, as a model to have custom-developed software. In reality, most stick with what we develop. Because it works, and once they have something that works they simply prefer to stay with it.
So: the Free DBR spreadsheet situation …
We made some powerful Excel-based DBR software available for free for a few years ago, when we shifted to recommending 3rd party DBR software. But we have not updated our Excel version of that “template” software and have withdrawn it from availability.
If you want to know more about our spreadsheet approach ,
Our office phone (8:30 to 5 PST) is as follows:
The following email is not clickable, sorry, but the spam robots are getting ever-smarter at harvesting even camouflaged “live” email addresses.
