Picture the scene:
It’s early July. The UK sun has made its rare but triumphant appearance, and supermarkets are rubbing their hands in anticipation of BBQ season. Sausages, burgers, potato salad, and something vaguely coleslaw-shaped are about to fly off the shelves. For one ready-meal manufacturer, this is the window — the golden hour of the grocery calendar. All they need is a solid production plan. Enter Maggie.
Maggie is the Operations Planner. Experienced, unflappable, and universally respected. She’s also armed with a spreadsheet so large it has its own postcode. Over the years, she’s built it, refined it, colour-coded it, and even named it: Beast Mode.xls. The visualisation layer, where planners view timelines, resource usage, and production flow. The navigator, which helps users manage and access different datasets and configurations within the planning model. The order viewer, where planners review detailed information on production orders and their status. These updates are designed to make the interface more intuitive, improve data visibility, and help users complete their planning tasks more efficiently. It’s complicated, moody, and prone to crashing if you so much as look at it funny. But it’s Maggie’s domain — and she knows every formula like the back of her hand.
Then came Tuesday. A major retailer pulled their forecast forward, doubling their burger order and adding a last-minute plea for extra vegetarian kebabs (“plant-based is so in right now”). Beast Mode responded with the elegance of a drunk octopus. Everything turned red.
The coleslaw line was still pumping out mayoheavy mixes when it should’ve been cleaned for the vegan range. Raw materials were stuck in limbo. Someone accidentally sent the entire beetroot stock to a site that doesn’t even make
salads.
And worst of all? Maggie’s laptop froze halfway through a manual reallocation — deleting
formulas that had taken her fifteen years to
perfect.
The sound she made caused the intern to back
slowly out of the room…
The Spreadsheet Struggle is Real
If you’re chuckling in sympathy, you probably know a Maggie. Or are a Maggie. Spreadsheets are brilliant, but they weren’t built for the high-stakes world of modern manufacturing scheduling. Especially when: You’re managing dozens of SKUs across multiple production lines Changeovers, resource limits, and raw material constraints are constantly shifting Forecasts change weekly (if not hourly) Every hour of downtime burns through profit Manual planning might give you control — but it also gives you stress, risk, and a deep-seated fear of pressing Ctrl+Z.
Enter Opcenter APS: Scheduling for Grown-Ups While Maggie was firefighting with formulas, other manufacturers were quietly using a smarter tool: Opcenter APS. It’s like giving your planning team night-vision goggles, a satnav, and a PA — all in one platform. With Opcenter APS, you can:
- Generate optimised schedules in
minutes, not days - React quickly to changing demand
without derailing the week - Model “what-if” scenarios to handle even
the most rogue kebab requests - Reduce downtime and improve on-time
delivery
It doesn’t just lighten the load for planners —it unlocks efficiencies across production, warehousing, procurement, and customer service.
And yes, Maggie saw the light.
After Beast Mode.xls crashed for the third time during a heatwave-induced sausage surge, she agreed to trial Opcenter APS. Within weeks, she was producing schedules faster than ever — and finally stopped calling her spreadsheet a “necessary evil.”
Moral of the Story?
Planning BBQ season with a spreadsheet is like trying to grill burgers over a tealight — technically possible, but probably not your best option.
If your business is still relying on manual tools for complex scheduling, maybe it’s time to retire Beast Mode.xls — and bring in a system that can actually handle the heat.
Want to see how Opcenter APS can help your team plan for the unpredictable?
Get in touch — we’d love to show you how smarter scheduling can save more than just Maggie’s summer
