The challenge
The plant's production plan lived in a set of large, interlinked spreadsheets. They worked, in the sense that the plant ran, but only because a small number of people understood the formulas and the workarounds. Every change to an order, a machine's availability or a material delivery rippled through the sheets in ways that were slow to check and easy to get wrong. Nobody could say with confidence which version of the plan was current.
What Booolean built
A planning matrix. Orders, production lines, time periods and materials are modelled explicitly. Planners work in a matrix view where demand is placed against capacity and the effect on materials and sequencing is calculated as they go.
Constraints that are visible. Capacity limits, material availability and sequencing rules are enforced by the system and shown to the planner at the point of decision, rather than discovered after the fact.
A single current plan. Versioning and history replaced the circulating copies. Everyone in the plant saw the same plan, and could see what had changed and who had changed it.
Reporting. Load, shortage and utilisation views generated from the plan itself.
How we worked
We started by sitting with the planners and the spreadsheets. The formulas were the specification, and the workarounds were the requirements nobody had written down. Both were turned into explicit rules with worked examples that the planning team signed off before the build, and those examples became the automated tests.
The system was introduced alongside the spreadsheets, with planners running both until they trusted the new one. Then the spreadsheets were retired.
The outcome
A planning process the plant could rely on and explain: one plan, constraints applied consistently, and changes that could be made and assessed in minutes rather than hours. The same thinking later shaped Dingo, our delivery management system.