TL;DR: This exclusive Q&A explores key themes such as eliminating plan-to-shop-floor latency, optimizing real-world capacity, building interoperable digital ecosystems, and leading the cultural change required to turn manufacturing into a competitive advantage.
Read on for practical insights and real-world examples of what connected planning and scheduling can unlock.
Manufacturers today operate in an environment challenged by compressed product-launch cycles, volatile demand, capacity constraints, and rising margin pressure. Meanwhile, legacy systems and siloed processes make it increasingly difficult to respond with speed and confidence. The growing gap between strategic plans and operational execution erodes service levels and hinders growth.
In this edition of our #ExpertInsights series, we sit down with Grayson Roeming, Proficy Scheduler Commercial Specialist at GE Vernova, to explore how leading organizations are closing that gap by rethinking how planning, scheduling, and execution work together.
Together, John Galt Solutions and GE Vernova Proficy Software help manufacturers break down functional silos and connect the strategic supply chain plan directly to the operational schedule. Connecting John Galt’s Atlas Planning Platform with GE Vernova’s Proficy Scheduler, organizations gain a single, executable view of demand, capacity, and constraints to enable faster decisions and drive greater supply chain agility.
Q1: The need to accelerate higher quality decisions is critical for organizations today. Can you walk us through a scenario where eliminating latency between the plan and shop floor has led to measurable improvement?
G. Roeming: When companies close the gap between supply chain planning and execution, manufacturing becomes a strategic asset.
You can unlock capacity, improve delivery, and create the confidence you need to invest, scale, and grow by connecting strategic planning with operational execution. We are passionate about working with companies who have:
- Avoided $80M manufacturing capacity investments by boosting capacity 20%,
- Improved OTIF from 40-99.8% in 10 months gaining two fortune 500 customers,
- Transitioned business from made to stock to made to order, doubling business over a 5-year period while adding 0 additional production staff,
- Increased weekly batch production from 4 to 20 by visualizing and coordinating labor, material, equipment with sanitation and maintenance.
Eliminating latency between the plan and shop floor enables manufacturing to do more than just improve operational cost and productivity, it enables manufacturing and supply chain to pivot from a cost center to a business enabler, and source of competitive advantage.
Q2: Capacity is one of, if not the most, limiting constraints for many plants. In practice, how do Proficy Scheduler and John Galt’s Atlas Planning Platform help companies better understand and optimize real-world capacity constraints?
G. Roeming: GE Vernova Proficy Scheduler and John Galt Solutions’ Atlas Planning Platform highlight otherwise hard to identify relationships between sales, purchasing, production, HR, IT, management and how they interact to improve cost.
Solving capacity is not a difficult problem to understand; it’s a difficult problem to solve when you’re managing thousands of SKUs and finite resources in Excel or ERP. For example, when planning and scheduling are siloed, we commonly see the following challenges on the shopfloor:
- 15-25% excess safety stock to buffer against uncertainty
- 5-10% stock out rates on high priority items because the schedule is unable to keep pace with demand
- Rush orders increase production cost by 20-30% due to transportation premiums, overtime and changeovers that break the flow of standard work
- OEE drops 10-15% due to running convenient orders over profitable ones
- 40% of a scheduler’s week is wasted on manually re-entering data in spreadsheets because the plan is inexecutable on the shop floor
When you bring planning and execution together, such as through Proficy Scheduler and Atlas, companies can reduce their decision-making cycle from up to 72 hours to less than 4 hours. Proficy Scheduler and Atlas in tandem empower organizations to visually coordinate and optimize material, labor, equipment, sanitation and maintenance seamlessly, breaking down the traditional silos.
Q3: From supply shocks to sudden regulatory changes or a new competitor’s pricing model, companies must be able to sense and respond quickly to change. Can you describe how a connected plan-to-schedule loop gives manufacturers greater control and agility?
G. Roeming: A connected plan-to-schedule loop allows organizations to sense disruptions earlier, simulate alternatives, and act decisively before customers feel the impact.
Best-of-breed architectures that support Interoperability reduce complexity while increasing capability, allowing companies to choose the strongest tools for each role without sacrificing end-to-end visibility. Today we’re bringing together a breadth of capabilities into a single view. At a very high level, some of these include:
GE Vernova Proficy Scheduler:
- Planned operation start/end times
- Operation status and progress
- Selected resource and constraints for operation
Atlas Planning Platform:
- Master materials
- Purchase and sales order lines
- Resources and calendars
- Production orders
- Routes
The result is a simplified software stack and openness that empowers you to get the data you need on your terms.
Q4: True visibility goes beyond dashboards. In your experience, what does end-to-end visibility look like in practice, and how does an integrated approach support synchronized execution across the enterprise?
G. Roeming: GE Vernova Proficy Software and John Galt Solutions work with category leaders to create foundational data standards to leverage advanced analytics and openly share data between suppliers, vendors and customers. This unified approach transforms the operational workflow in three critical ways:
- Users enjoy easier and broader access to higher quality information across the entire value chain
- The organization maintains increased speed of iteration and implementation for production changes
- The factory floor facilitates frictionless collaboration between humans and machines
GE Vernova Proficy Software and John Galt Solutions produce data companies rely on to stabilize the manufacturing environment, leverage the work of colleagues across domains and to standardize information as it flows through the organization.
Q5: Technology is only part of the equation. In your experience, what cultural or organizational shifts have you seen been the most impactful to help build trust around these advanced planning and scheduling capabilities?
G. Roeming: Organizational change is multi-layered, and the single most critical opportunity is top-down executive commitment.
A successful transformation is about leadership, and when executives are fully invested we see these initiative shine. Three areas of focus for leaders undergoing a transformation include:
- Crafting and selling the vision
- Overcoming front line, site level and executive resistance
- Executing and sustaining the change
There is a difference between sharing a vision and a shared vision, focus on the following to build trust and transition jargon to culture transformation.
Crafting and selling the vision – Understanding how technology enables operating systems and new ways of working regarding people and process is key. Transformation lives within operations, it must be a technology pull, not a technology push.
Overcoming resistance – Tackle resistance at the shop floor, site and executive level head on with education and demonstration.
Success lives and dies on the shopfloor. To accelerate adoption, you must personify the transformation for the employees using GE Vernova Proficy Scheduler and John Galt Atlas every day.
- Demonstrate how connecting planning and scheduling makes shop floor lives easier with fewer rush orders, less manual data entry and a more predictable workday.
- Implement changes in a crawl – walk – run method to maintain steady performance while building momentum toward advanced planning and scheduling.
Achieving supply chain agility doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a fundamental change in how the executive team views the connection between operational capabilities and financial commitments.
- Educate the executive team on “what good looks like” by showing how a 10% improvement in planning and scheduling efficiency directly impacts working capital, in what magnitude and when they should expect to see that impact.
- Clearly outline the A-B-C journey and steps from manual scheduling (a) to integrated planning (b) and eventually autonomous optimization (c) while being realistic about the risks, retrenchments plans and timelines.
- Embed digitization into standard work by leveraging insights from GE Vernova Proficy Scheduler and John Galt Atlas as the primary driver for daily stand ups and executive reviews.
Help site leaders understand how their role changes from running a site that keeps the lights on to talking about:
- Creating a connected, adaptive, autonomous environment that is self-optimizing
- Evolve standard work to exception management and prescriptive decision making
- Deliver actionable role specific insights in real time
Taking site leaders along the A-B-C journey and giving them a sense for how their role changes while empowering them with the right communications to be the champion of the transformation is the hardest part.
Executing and sustaining the change – Work to ensure you have strong process rigor and high data quality. It’s best practice to work on refining your data and processes before taking the next step. If you try to build a strategy on top of something that isn’t ready you can fail.
Transformation doesn’t just happen when the technology is ready, it happens when the people are ready. The best leaders don’t implement change, they make it clear, structured and embrace it at every level.
About Grayson Roeming
Grayson Roeming began his career at GE Vernova on the inside sales team where he facilitated 100+ multi-site digital manufacturing projects and helped bring in over $20M+ in revenue. Following GE Vernova’s acquisition of ROB-EX A/S, Grayson was tapped to grow the newly acquired business Scheduler solution in the America’s and devoting all his time to becoming an advanced planning and scheduling specialist where he brings a digital manufacturing perspective to the end-to-end supply chain integration.
