Workshop Finite Scheduling System

This is the second posting of this project as althought great effort was made my previous winning bidder couldnt quite complete the project as required, and elements came up during the development which were not originally considered. So I am back here now to see if someone else is available to help me on this. I run a small engineering factory which has a variety of machines in it. I am struggling with being able to quote customers accurate delivery dates on parts we make. This is not only upsetting my customers but also costing us, as a company, a lot of money because we end up running small batches to get the customers out of trouble. What I currently have is an bespoke production control system we utilise in our business. The program is written on Microsoft Access. The developer who worked for me for many years in his free time has now retired, but he is available to help or give advice to anyone on this project. I need some kind of system that will enable automatic scheduling of work onto [login to view URL] system should in the main part auto schedule, but also give me the flexibility of manually rescheduling ideally graphically on a Gantt chart. We have facilities for collecting real time data from the shop floor, such as logging on and off of tasks in jobs. All jobs have a set process through the workshop and the scheduler should follow this pattern to schedule work. As an example, I may have a job sheet that has 3 tasks.......... 1) Turning - 20 hours 2) Milling - 25 hours 3) Plating - Sub contract. In this example the Turning would be completed first and the Milling could not commence until the Turning had finished. the final plating process would be a sub-contracted process and could take days rather than hours and again could not be done until the Milling has been completed. We also need to consider rush jobs, of which we have many in our business. A customer comes in with an emergency job and we have to respond. We need the scheduler to tell us how many hours overtime need to be completed on that machine to catch up if we fall behind, or what jobs are going to be affected and by how much. Some of the machines can run unmanned, so we need a way of telling the scheduler how long into the night it actually ran for. The person I am looking for this project should be able to interface with my Access database to get the information needed to schedule and report back to it, any info it needs. As I said you will have an extremely competent and in depth knowledge of my database from the person who wrote it for me at your disposal. I am looking to get this project completed as soon as possible. Id prefer to hear any questions you have before you bid, as id like whoever I award the project to is able to complete it to the end. There are many "off the shelf" packages to do the job for me, but they are quite expensive and still need integrating with your own systems and date, so I thought having a bespoke one that does what I want is the better way. Look forward to your questions/bids.