Most machine shops plan in a spreadsheet. It works until the shop grows past it — then one person owns the file, everyone else works from a printout, and a double-booked machine only shows up on the shop floor. Orkyo replaces that file with a live plan.
The workstation is the unit you plan
In Orkyo the place where the work happens is the thing you schedule. A workstation sits on your floorplan, and what stands at it — the mill, the press, the bench — is part of that workstation, described by its properties. When a job calls for a 5-axis mill, Orkyo matches that requirement against those properties and books the workstation that satisfies it.
So there is no machine register to keep in sync with a layout, and no question of which list is right. Scheduling a job "on the mill" and booking the workstation the mill stands at are the same operation, because they're the same record.
Where the work happens
Your shop floor, drawn as workstations — a machining cell, a bay, a bench. The machine at one is part of that workstation, not a second entry to maintain.
What's brought to it
Fixtures, gauges, portable equipment — booked alongside the job, and free to move between workstations and sites.
Who does it
Operators and setters, matched to jobs by the qualifications they actually hold.
Properties and availability, per workstation
Each workstation carries its own capacity, whether it's booked exclusively or shared, its planned downtime for maintenance and changeover, and the site-wide closures it sits under — a shutdown week, a holiday. Take a machine out for a week and every job that was counting on it surfaces as a conflict straight away, rather than on the morning it was due to run.
Call these things whatever your shop calls them. Orkyo ships with Spaces, People and Tools; rename Spaces to Workstations, Cells or Machines, or add a type of your own — it gets the same management page and the same reach as the built-in ones.
Where the scheduling spreadsheet breaks
- Conflicts stay invisible. Two jobs on one machine look fine in adjacent cells. Orkyo flags the overlap when it's created, not when it reaches the floor.
- One person owns the file. The plan lives on a laptop and the shop works from a stale copy. In Orkyo, everyone reads the same current plan, with roles controlling who can change it.
- A change means a rebuild. One rush job and the sheet gets rearranged by hand. Move a job in Orkyo and everything it touches — the workstation, the people, the tools — moves with it.
- Utilization is guesswork. A spreadsheet can't tell you which machine is the bottleneck. Orkyo tracks how loaded each resource actually is.
- A second site means a second file. Orkyo plans multiple sites in one place, so capacity in one shop is visible from the other.
We wrote these five up in full in Outgrowing the machine-shop Excel schedule — including when to stay in the spreadsheet. If that's you, take our free capacity-planning template; it flags overbooked days, which is as far as a spreadsheet honestly goes.
Built for shops, not for enterprises
Orkyo is aimed at shops that have outgrown the spreadsheet but are nowhere near needing an ERP — roughly 10 to 250 people. It's a planning tool: capacity, scheduling, and conflicts, at day granularity. Setup is measured in days, not in implementation projects.
Read the documentation for how jobs, resources, and sites fit together, or see the full feature list.
See it against your own shop's plan.