If you think of supply, inventory and demand planning as the building materials of your supply chain operation, production scheduling is the tool you use to assemble them into a functional supply chain. Production scheduling is the coordination mechanism that aligns resources, timeframes and activities across your entire supply chain. It is pivotal to determining the exact timing and quantity of products to be manufactured, maximizing efficiency while minimizing stockouts. It works hand-in-hand with demand planning to ensure a balanced flow of materials throughout the production process, optimizing when, where and how to use resources to produce products based on demand forecasts and customer demand. Production scheduling has a direct impact on customer satisfaction – when a customer is placing an order, the production schedule ensures that the order is satisfied in full and on time. In other words, when your production scheduling is off, everything is off.
In this blog, we’ll look at some of the key elements of production scheduling and the best practices you can follow to make sure it is always on point.
Four Components of Effective Production Scheduling
As with all supply chain elements, establishing a good foundation is the first step. There are four basic factors to keep in mind.
- Take control of your data. Data is the heart of production scheduling. Problem is, there’s a lot of it: demand, production hours, shipped hours, materials inventory, labor hours…the list goes on. Apart from ensuring the data is as accurate as possible, the most important requirement is to have all your information from all sources integrated into a single platform so it’s convenient to analyze. This is foundational to an effective scheduling process.
- KISS (Keep it Simply Scheduled). When it comes to inputting your data into scheduling applications, sometimes, you need to take a step back and be selective about which constraints are truly important. Many production scheduling implementations fail because businesses try to model all the possible complexities. This constrains the application so much that the output . A scheduling application is not meant to replace the scheduler — there are too many potential variables and disruptions, from a worker calling out sick to delayed raw materials, to achieve a perfect initial output. Simplify the business constraints to get an output that’s good enough for a base schedule and let your scheduler handle the nuances, using the tool, when necessary changes inevitably arise.
- Balance flexibility and efficiency. Scheduling can’t be a completely autonomous planning system. There are a lot of moving pieces. Production scheduling software can provide a base for the scheduler to work with, but they must have the flexibility to adapt as circumstances change within the day. For example, if you move a production order from Wednesday to Monday, you need to instantly calculate for variables like the availability of raw materials to create it. Schedulers need to understand how these changes impact the entire supply chain. That’s where scheduling applications that model changes quickly and easily come in handy.
- Metrics matter. Having key quantitative performance metrics to compare plans is crucial. Capacity utilization and OTIF – the number of orders you’re filling on-time and in full – are two of the most valuable. When your application generates a schedule, it has associated theoretical values for those metrics showing what capacity utilization and OTIF would be if you proceeded with the schedule as generated. As your scheduler makes modifications, they can evaluate the effects of those changes by monitoring the revised projections for those metrics to determine the optimal updates to make and which schedule to proceed with.
Tools of the Production Scheduling Trade
Many businesses rely on manual scheduling, but they are missing out on untapped potential by not using a production scheduling software application. A good scheduling application can take point on combining data from all your sources into one place and laying out an initial plan based on that data. This level of automation allows your scheduler to spend their time where it’s most effective: addressing disruptions by tweaking the schedule.
Bringing it All Together
Just as change management is a key component of production scheduling, openness to change in the process is a key component of improving the process. Supply chain production scheduling today requires that you understand the role of the scheduler and how their job can be made easier with the use of the right tools to wrangle and make sense of the flood of data upon which the schedule depends. At Arkieva, we offer solutions that enable faster, responsive, more reliable production scheduling with the flexibility to tackle your organization’s unique scheduling challenges.
This blog is the second in a series examining best practices to refine your processes and develop a more reliable, more robust supply chain. You can use the following links to review other blogs in the series: demand planning.
