Back in early 90s, Feliks Gadzinski was working at a new large warehouse that was soon going to open in the next few months. He has been brought in to help test a new, custom-built, Warehouse Management Software (WMS). The warehouse was a huge facility, 1,000,000 sq ft, and had an extensive conveyor system to help move product around the facility. One day a logistics consultant struck up a conversation and mention that the facility was lacking software to help manage the flow of goods going to the shipping department. The scenario was quite typical. There were many conveyor lanes ending near the shipping doors. The ideal scenario was to balance the conveyor flow of goods across those lanes so that work was evenly distributed and operations would run smoothly. Feliks picked up on the opportunity, submitted a proposal and few months later implemented the first version of ScheduleMate. This was a graphical tool that helped a Scheduler manage the outbound flow of goods in the warehouse. The key feature that made ScheduleMate a success was that it displayed the schedule information graphically and the schedule could be adjusted using drag/drop, quickly and easily. This was quite unique for its time in the world of warehousing where major systems to this day are still command prompt system requiring keyboard input to get things done. The success lead to others and ScheduleMate was implemented in other similar facilities, large warehouses with conveyor systems. The feature set grew and the software matured for the 15 years. In typical scenarios ScheduleMate would be planning the delivery of 50,000 cartons in a day.
Over the years, Minidata would often get invited to smaller facilities that were having scheduling issues. They had a need for a graphical scheduler to help manage their business. ScheduleMate wasn't a good fit because it is customized software that needed consulting services to get up and running. For smaller businesses it was too big a product for them.
So in 2002, Minidata decided to come up with another version of ScheduleMate that would better suit businesses that were looking for simpler scheduling solutions. The new version is called MaxScheduler.
Credits
Feliks Gadzinski has been the main driving force behind ScheduleMate and child product MaxScheduler for the last 15 years. He worked extensively as a logistics consulting developing custom scheduling solutions. Feliks background is in optimization and control theory. He has a Ph.d in Electrical Engineering. Feliks is now semi-retired.
Peter Gadzinski is the product manager behind MaxScheduler. He pushed Feliks into created an off-the-shelf version of ScheduleMate to address the growing market of businesses that need an easy to use schedule tool for their business operations. Yes, we are a father/son team in case your wondering.