Most Polish manufacturing SMEs "plan" production in Excel and on a magnetic board in the planner's office. As long as the shop floor runs what's written in the notebook, the system holds up well enough. The trouble starts with the first rush order of the week — and repeats every day after that.
At one of our clients — a 32-person aluminium joinery manufacturer in central Poland — the production plan lived in an Excel sheet updated once a week, with a projection pinned on a magnetic board. Every Tuesday morning the planner posted the plan for seven days. On Wednesday a rush order from a retail-chain customer came in — the plan was shifted by hand, five magnets moved on the board, Excel was updated, but the shop-floor foreman only learned about the change after lunch. Material orders for aluminium profiles reached the purchasing team two days late, because nobody recalculated usage straight away. The result: 30,000–40,000 PLN a year in contract penalties and a two-week lead time in the price list, even though the shop could produce the item in five days. The fix wasn't a 180,000 PLN APS — the fix was a simple online schedule fed from production orders in Comarch Optima, displayed on two screens on the floor and on the foreman's phone. Three months after go-live: average lead time 7 working days (down from 14), penalties down 72%, project cost 34,000 PLN.
Scheduling in an SME isn't a technology problem. It's a consistency problem: the office is in one place, the floor in another, purchasing in a third, sales in a fourth. Each knows a fragment of the plan and each assumes the other three know the same thing. They don't.
The three places where a schedule breaks
A schedule in an SME rarely dies from lack of tooling. It dies at three specific moments that repeat at every client we've spoken to in the last few years.
First — the mid-week rush order. A sales rep agrees to "tomorrow" because the customer is a key account. They don't go back to the planner — they send an email to the production manager, who "will squeeze it in somehow". The original plan is already dead, but nobody updated it. Two other orders slip, the floor runs them blindly, and on Friday it turns out the one promised to customer B won't ship.
Second — purchasing discovers a material shortage the day before production. The plan says "Monday, order X". Nobody generated a materials list for this week on Thursday evening, because the plan was on paper. On Monday morning the floor is idle because two BOM items are missing, and the supplier has a two-day lead time.
Third — a change made in the office never reaches the floor. The planner moves the magnets, updates Excel, prints a new order sheet. The foreman doesn't know the sequence has changed — he's working off the sheet printed at 7 a.m. Two stations run orders in the old sequence, one in the new, and nobody understands why the finishing operations don't line up.
Note that none of these three moments requires a 200,000 PLN APS. Each one requires only that the plan live in a single place and that any change there be visible to everyone immediately.
When Excel is enough — and when it isn't
Excel plus a magnetic board is not a joke. In many SMEs it's genuinely a good solution — as long as you stay within a few boundaries.
Excel is enough when: you produce one or two product types in similar technology; you have one to four parallel lines/stations; you run 10–30 orders a week; rush orders happen less than once every two weeks; and — most important — the planner is one person physically sitting next to the shop floor.
Excel breaks when: the number of parallel stations exceeds 6–8; you run more than 50 orders a week; you produce many variants with different BOMs; changeovers take over 20–30 minutes (then order sequencing really affects throughput); or the planner works remotely even one day a week and the floor can't reach them in real time.
The limit isn't company size, it's the combinatorial complexity of the plan. You can have 60 people and three machines making the same product — Excel handles it fine. You can have 15 people, five stations, twenty product variants and a demanding retail-chain customer — Excel is a time bomb.
What APS does, and who really needs it
APS (Advanced Planning and Scheduling) is the class of tools that solves optimal order sequencing while accounting for changeovers, machine availability, operator skills, material delivery calendars and customer deadlines. It sounds beautiful. The catch is that a good APS costs 150,000–400,000 PLN upfront in an SME, takes nine months to implement — and another six for the company to start trusting it.
APS makes sense when three conditions are met at once: you produce in combinatorial variety (dozens of variants with different technologies), changeovers are expensive (over 30 minutes, where sequence drives throughput), and you have enough orders that a human simply can't calculate the best sequence in their head. In practice that usually means companies of 50 people and up, with a shop of 8+ machines.
For most SMEs in the 15–50 range, APS is overkill. You pay 300,000 for an optimisation engine while your real problem is: "the plan from the office doesn't reach the floor in under 4 hours".
The middle option — what to do before you go for APS
Between Excel and APS there's a wide band of solutions that are enough for most manufacturing SMEs for years. It's not a shrink-wrap product — it's a set of small decisions that together fix the three breakpoints from the start of this piece.
- One online schedule, fed from orders in the ERP. Not an Excel pushed to a network drive — a web view that shows production orders from Comarch Optima, enova365 or Subiekt GT in one place, in real time. Everyone with a link sees the same thing.
- Screens on the shop floor. Two large monitors at key spots show the same schedule as the planner. A change in the ERP = a change on the screen within a minute. Cost: 2 × 55-inch TV + mini-PC = roughly 5,000 PLN.
- Push notifications for the foreman. When the planner moves an order, a mobile app pushes to the foreman: "order 1247 moved from Tuesday to Monday". No phone call, no asking around.
- Automatic materials export to purchasing. Every morning at 6:00 the system recalculates the plan for seven days ahead, matches it against BOMs, deducts stock, and generates a list of items to order. Purchasing gets it by email or in a supplier portal — no Excel hunting.
- Change history on the plan. Every change is logged with timestamp, person and reason. It's not control — it's your save in the "who promised Tuesday" argument.
That kind of setup in an SME costs 30,000–80,000 PLN upfront plus 300–800 PLN monthly (hosting, licences, small tweaks). It doesn't optimise changeovers like APS. But it solves 80% of the real problem, because the real problem was "the plan doesn't synchronise", not "the plan is mathematically suboptimal".
What next
If your production plan lives in an Excel edited by one person while the rest of the company calls to find out what's current — the first step isn't buying a tool. It's a ten-minute conversation with the foreman about which of the three breakpoints from the start of this piece ruins your week most often. Only then do you know whether you need a small middle-option project, a real APS, or just process discipline around the Excel you already have.
We help manufacturing SMEs put together these projects — from an audit of current planning to an online schedule integrated with the ERP. The first call is free and takes half an hour.
A schedule that lives only on the board in the planner's office isn't a schedule — it's an approximation that the shop floor, purchasing and sales have to guess at every day.