Detailed Planning and POOGI

What is Detailed Planning?

Detailed Planning is iVSS's advanced scheduling analysis feature. While the Velocity Board and TBR Board show you the current state, Detailed Planning looks deeper — identifying constraints, predicting problems, and recommending specific changes to improve throughput.

Think of the Velocity Board as your car's speedometer. Detailed Planning is the engine diagnostics — it tells you what's going on under the hood and what to fix first.

What is POOGI?

POOGI stands for Process Of On-Going Improvement. It's a concept from the Theory of Constraints — the manufacturing philosophy that iVSS is built on.

The idea is simple: your shop's output is limited by its tightest constraint. Find that constraint, improve it, and the whole shop gets better. Then find the next constraint, improve that, and keep going. On and on, forever.

POOGI in iVSS is the system that:

1. Identifies your current constraints
2. Flags situations where the schedule violates those constraints
3. Recommends changes to improve flow
4. Tracks compliance over time

Capacity Constraint Resources (CCR)

A CCR is the work center (machine or department) that is currently limiting your shop's overall throughput. It's your bottleneck.

Every shop has one. It might be:

• The CNC mill that every job needs
• The welding department that's understaffed
• The paint booth that can only run during certain hours
• The inspection station that's backed up

Why the CCR matters

Your entire shop can only move as fast as your CCR. If your CCR can process 8 hours of work per day, your shop's daily output is effectively 8 hours — no matter how much capacity every other work center has.

This is why flooding the floor with work doesn't help. If everything has to go through a bottleneck, more work just means a longer line at the bottleneck.

How iVSS identifies the CCR

Detailed Planning analyzes:

• How much work is queued at each work center
• The capacity of each work center (available hours per day)
• The routing data for all scheduled and released buckets

It then shows you which work center has the highest load relative to its capacity. That's your CCR. For example, if your CNC mill has 8 hours of capacity per day but 14 hours of queued work, its load ratio is 175% — almost certainly your CCR.

What Detailed Planning shows you

When you open Detailed Planning, you'll see:

Load analysis

A breakdown of work center loads — how many hours of work are assigned to each work center vs. how many hours that work center has available. Work centers at or over capacity are highlighted in red. A work center at 120% load has 20% more work than it can handle in the available time — that overage is the queue that slows everything downstream.

Constraint identification

The system identifies which work center is the primary constraint and shows how it affects the overall schedule. The CCR is the single work center that most limits your shop's throughput right now.

Sequencing recommendations

Based on the CCR and other factors, iVSS may recommend changes to your bucket sequence. For example:

• "Move Bucket #47 ahead of Bucket #45 because #47's work at the CCR is shorter and can clear faster"
• "Delay Bucket #52 because releasing it now would overload the welding department"

POOGI events

When the system detects a situation that violates scheduling best practices, it creates a POOGI event. These are notifications that something is off:

• Resource conflict — too much work scheduled at the same work center at the same time
• Precedence violation — an assembly bucket is scheduled before its components
• Capacity overload — a work center is being asked to do more than it can handle in the time available

Each POOGI event includes a severity level, the specific buckets and work centers involved, and a recommended action. Do not dismiss them without reading the details first.

Applying recommendations

When Detailed Planning suggests changes, you have the option to apply them. This reorders your TBR Board based on the system's analysis.

You can:

• Apply all recommendations — let the system adjust the full sequence
• Review individual recommendations — look at each suggestion and decide which to accept
• Ignore recommendations — keep your current sequence (but understand you're overriding data-driven analysis)

Concrete example: How a sequence change saves time at the CCR

Your CCR is the CNC Mill (8 hours of capacity per day). Three buckets are queued in this order:

In the current sequence, Bucket #47 (2 hours of CNC work, due Thursday) waits behind Bucket #45 (6 hours of CNC work). That means #47 does not start its CNC step until 6 hours into the day — and it misses Thursday's shipping window.

Detailed Planning recommends: Move #47 to position 1. The CNC Mill processes #47's 2 hours first, clearing it by 10:00 AM. Then #45 starts at 10:00 AM and finishes by end of day. Result: #47 ships on time Thursday, and #45 still finishes by Friday. The same 8 hours of CNC capacity are used, but in the right order.

This is why sequence matters more than speed. You did not add capacity. You did not work overtime. You just changed the order.

POOGI compliance tracking

Over time, iVSS tracks how well your shop is following the scheduling discipline:

• How often are POOGI events triggered?
• How quickly are they resolved?
• Is the same type of violation happening repeatedly?

This creates an audit trail that helps you spot patterns. If the same work center keeps showing up as overloaded, maybe it's time to add capacity there. If precedence violations keep happening, maybe your bucketization process needs adjustment.

When to use Detailed Planning

Regularly: Check Detailed Planning at least once a day (or at the start of each shift) to see if the system has identified issues.

Before major releases: Before releasing a batch of buckets, check whether the current sequence will overload any work centers.

When things feel off: If the Velocity Board is showing a lot of yellow and red, Detailed Planning can help you understand why. It might reveal a hidden bottleneck.

During planning meetings: Use the load analysis to have data-driven discussions about capacity, staffing, and priorities.

The VSS training perspective

Detailed Planning embodies the core VSS philosophy:

1. Find the constraint. Don't try to optimize everything — optimize the bottleneck.

2. Subordinate to the constraint. Everything else in the schedule should serve the constraint. Don't starve it (keep it fed with work) and don't overload it (queue more than it can handle).

3. Elevate the constraint. If the constraint is chronic, invest in fixing it — add a shift, buy another machine, outsource overflow work.

4. Repeat. Once you fix one constraint, another will emerge. That's normal. POOGI is about continuous improvement, not a one-time fix.

When you override Detailed Planning recommendations, you're essentially saying "I can see something the data can't." Sometimes that's true. But if you're overriding frequently, ask yourself: is there something the system is seeing that I'm missing?

The Two Tests

Ineffectiveness — are you doing what you should NOT do?

• Ignoring POOGI events. When you dismiss POOGI notifications without reading them, you are telling the system "I don't care about bottlenecks." The consequence: the same overload or conflict compounds day after day until it becomes a crisis — late deliveries, overtime, and missed due dates that were preventable.
• Overriding all recommendations without investigation. If you reject every sequence recommendation because "I know my shop better," you are throwing away the system's analysis of your own data. The consequence: you keep the CCR starved or overloaded when a simple reorder would have fixed it, and on-time delivery suffers for no reason.
• Optimizing non-constraints. Spending time improving throughput at a work center that is NOT the CCR does nothing for overall shop output. If your CNC Mill is the bottleneck at 175% load, making the paint booth 10% faster does not ship a single job sooner. The consequence: wasted effort and no improvement in delivery performance.

Unreliability — are you NOT doing what you SHOULD do?

• Not checking Detailed Planning daily. POOGI events and constraint data change as new work enters the system. If you only check once a week, you are reacting to problems that were visible (and fixable) days earlier. The consequence: preventable conflicts become firefighting emergencies.
• Not reviewing POOGI events weekly. Even if you check daily, a weekly review of POOGI event patterns reveals whether the same violation is recurring. The consequence of skipping this: you fix symptoms one at a time but never address the root cause (e.g., a work center that needs an added shift, or a bucketization rule that keeps creating precedence violations).
• Not addressing recurring violations. If the same POOGI event type fires three weeks in a row, it is not a random occurrence — it is a systemic problem. Failing to escalate or resolve it means you are accepting a permanent drag on throughput.

Key takeaway

Detailed Planning is your diagnostic tool. It finds bottlenecks, predicts problems, and recommends solutions. POOGI is the philosophy of continuous improvement — always finding and addressing the current constraint. Use these tools regularly to keep your shop running at peak efficiency, and trust the data over instinct when they conflict.