rscp.co
Rapid Supply Chain Planning
Planning tools built by the people who plan, tested like software.
Fast and flexible where you need it. Rigorous where it matters.
rscp.co puts the development of supply chain planning tools in the hands of the people who run operations and supply chain. It teaches a method for building them fast, growing them without starting again, and taking them as far as your organisation needs.
Planning happens in spreadsheets, for good reason
Your ERP is called enterprise resource planning, but it records the past; it does not plan. The past happened one way. The future is a space of possible outcomes, and working through it is the planner's job, so the planning moves to spreadsheets.
This is not another page about how error-prone spreadsheets are. Excel gives the planner something no other tool does: you can see the data. Not the first five rows, but all of it, its whole size and shape, at every step. That is why the people who plan build in Excel, and why they are right to.
The trouble starts with the matrix
Most planning tools begin with the result someone wants to see: items down the side, weeks across the top, the plan in the middle. A matrix is quick to build, so the first version arrives fast.
Then the questions grow. Another site, a second resource, a lot size, a new constraint. Each one means reworking the matrix, because every formula in it depends on where everything else sits. The tool that was fast in the beginning becomes slow in the middle and brittle in the end. A matrix is a view, not a structure, and views do not grow.
Build in blocks
The method builds a planning tool from blocks, each with an input, a logic step and an output: a column, a template sheet, a module. Because each block's output is a table, the next block can read it, so today's end result becomes tomorrow's intermediate step, and a new question is a new block rather than a rebuild. The matrix you wanted is still there, as a view at the end, and you can still see all the data at every step.
Every block carries a data and logic contract: what goes in and what comes out, how the answer is worked out, and the tests that check both every time the tool runs.
Two ways in, five steps
You start from what you have: a planning tool that works, mostly, or the data from your ERP and a question it cannot answer. Either way, every step makes the next one easier.
- Checked. If you have a tool, it is surveyed for broken, misaligned and masked formulas, and you decide what each was meant to do. If you are starting fresh, your data is checked against the answer you need: which fields carry the right meaning, and what has to be defined new.
- Legible. The tool is built in blocks, in Excel: rebuilt to give the same answers as the checked one, or built from the checked data and shown to reconcile with it.
- Proven. Every block is held to its contract, with tests, so the numbers can be defended and the tool explains itself without its author.
- Movable. The one block that needs it can change form, to Python for instance, while the rest stays as it is.
- Shared. The tool runs for the team, with data checked as it arrives and results where people look.
xlrig is the toolkit the method is built with.
Where it comes from
The method is the successor to the Fast Excel Development Method, which production-scheduling.com has taught since 2000. The speed is the same. What is new is the structure that lets a tool keep growing.
Worked examples, MRP first
Each worked example builds a real planning tool step by step and shows the same function in a new form. The first is material requirements planning, with a difference, starting from a tool you have. Capacity planning follows, starting fresh from the orders MRP produces, because MRP assumes every work centre has all the capacity it needs.
Start with the free course
Short lessons that follow the worked examples, step by step. Register and we will send the first lessons when they open.