Preactor 200 FCS is the first of the FCS solutions that is capable of being tightly integrated with other packages as well as Preactor Viewers.  The SQL database can be altered by editing a text file that is read by Preactor when it loads and automatically makes the changes to SQL.  The menu system can also be changed.  An event based messaging system can be used to pass data between applications.

Orders can have a ‘Delivery Buffer’ defined that can be customer or product specific.  This is a time period which is used to offset the due date reference when an order is backward sequenced and also provides a warning when operations are scheduled within the buffer.

Operations within an order can overlap using a Transfer Batching feature.  Batches can be automatically split into smaller lots and scheduled across multiple resources. The colour of bars can also be changed to reflect real-time progress. Operations can be set to ‘Hold’ so that it will not be scheduled automatically.

Whereas in Preactor Lite and Preactor 100 FCS there is only one type of resource, in Preactor 200 FCS additional resources can be defined.  For example additional resources required for a process step may be operators, tooling etc.  These ‘secondary resources’ are modelled as having infinite capacity in Preactor 200 FCS and the usage is available as graphs or plots.  These plots can be made to change colour when a certain usage is reached so that operations can be dragged and dropped to change the usage of these secondary resources.  These plots are displayed in a muti-plot window that not only shows secondary resource usage but also capacity utilisation by period for primary and secondary resources.

The run speed of each resource within a resource group (workcentre) for a specific operations step for a product can be defined and setup times can be made sequence dependent rather than fixed.

There is a ‘Schedule Repair’ feature that automatically moves operations into the correct sequence after updates have been entered without altering the resource allocated and without a reschedule.