Production tracking & scheduling

Overview

With today’s emphasis on efficiency and productivity, effective production planning and scheduling is a critical element of a successful manufacturing operation. The basic purpose of scheduling is well-known: minimizing production time and costs, and delivering the product when the customer needs it.

Not always recognized is that the actual impact of a production schedule can be much more far-reaching – as we outline in The benefits of effective production planning and scheduling. This is particularly true for an engineer-to-order/project-based manufacturer where the impact of getting behind schedule can have a “domino effect” on business operations for many weeks or even months.

Every manufacturing business employs a scheduling process of some type. For many companies it’s basically a manual process, supported by spreadsheets, wall charts and calculators. This can be adequate up to a point, but producing effective production plans and schedules this way can be a very time-consuming and complicated process, and it can be difficult to make changes quickly enough to satisfy the needs of shop floor management. As a result, the schedules tend to be short-term, providing limited visibility into the future, and may not be updated as often as they should due to other more pressing day-to-day priorities.

Ultimately, especially as a business grows and pressure for productivity improvements increases, the process can simply become too cumbersome and inefficient to be effective. Scheduling systems can dramatically reduce the effort and turnaround time, and are increasingly being used by manufacturers to streamline their scheduling processes.

What is the most effective scheduling system for ETO/Project-based manufacturing?