The fundamental essentials of business management involve planning, organizing, motivating and measuring.  Throughout these defined areas of management, attention and a great deal of time and effort are spent arranging the order in which work will be accomplished.  One of the most difficult challenges facing management is controlling, scheduling, and tracking the multitude of activities which must take place to realize a maximum of work output within such parameters as capacity at workstations, management priorities and customer delivery promises.

Improved scheduling leads to more efficient plant operations, realistic customer promises, and provides a foundation for material requirements planning.  Scheduling also leads to improved capacity management in terms of solving capacity bottlenecks and orienting marketing efforts towards selling open capacities of the enterprise.

DMS is a computerized solution for the vast number of challenging factors, which influence a modern enterprise.  DMS can be applied to any activity in the workplace that justifies scheduling to organize and control its endeavors.  Notwithstanding, for purposes of this documentation, let us consider its application to one of the most dynamic areas of management, manufacturing scheduling. 

DMS can execute either as a Finite or Infinite Schedule; with finite schedules reflecting what is actually happening on the shop floor, while infinite schedules are used for analysis.  In a typical shop, each job that is planned is made up of several operations, which may be moved from Resource to Resource during the production process.

DMS can process a job's operations as either production oriented or fabrication/maintenance oriented.  A production job is a job whose operations are scheduled based on quantity remaining to be produced.  A fabrication/maintenance job is a job whose operations are scheduled based on a time frame rather than quantity remaining.  DMS can schedule both production jobs, as well as maintenance/fabrication jobs on the same schedule.

When you schedule jobs, the scheduler follows a scheduling process to accomplish its tasks.  It is expected that the shop would follow the resulting schedule.  Nevertheless, there are uncontrollable interruptions or schedule changes that occur.  DMS has been designed to reflect the realities of the shop floor and handle these interruptions.