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.
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:
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:
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.
Detailed Planning analyzes:
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.
When you open Detailed Planning, you'll see:
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.
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.
Based on the CCR and other factors, iVSS may recommend changes to your bucket sequence. For example:
When the system detects a situation that violates scheduling best practices, it creates a POOGI event. These are notifications that something is off:
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.
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:
Your CCR is the CNC Mill (8 hours of capacity per day). Three buckets are queued in this order:
| Position | Bucket | CNC Mill time | Due date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | #45 | 6 hours | Friday |
| 2 | #47 | 2 hours | Thursday |
| 3 | #48 | 4 hours | Friday |
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.
Over time, iVSS tracks how well your shop is following the scheduling discipline:
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.
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.
Detailed Planning embodies the core VSS philosophy:
Find the constraint. Don't try to optimize everything — optimize the bottleneck.
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).
Elevate the constraint. If the constraint is chronic, invest in fixing it — add a shift, buy another machine, outsource overflow work.
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?
Ineffectiveness — are you doing what you should NOT do?
Unreliability — are you NOT doing what you SHOULD do?
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.