Building the Strongest Production Schedule for Your Company

The production schedule is probably the most critical document in any manufacturing facility. Producing that schedule is a monumental task. Order volumes, product mix, labor skills, the speed of various factory lines, maintenance concerns, and a host of other factors go into the crafting of a production schedule. For most factories the production schedule controls the operations and determines profit levels, cash flow, and on-time delivery.

Most production planners cite creating a production schedule as the most challenging and time-consuming part of their job. Unlike decades past, the modern factory typically has dozens of lines producing thousands or tens of thousands of different products. Each of these products has its own unique set of challenges to the facility, and it’s crucial for the manager to take this into account as he or she makes the weekly production schedule.

Every facility is unique, and therefore building a production schedule is a different process for each one. In factories with steady orders and few products, it’s often possible to repeat the previous week’s schedule but make a few minor changes to account for personnel movement and maintenance. Few factories in America can choose to operate this way anymore, however.

Instead, creating the factory production schedule starts by pulling the weekly orders from the front office. From here, planners assign orders to the lines that they believe will handle them most efficiently, assigning staff along the way. Finally, maintenance is shoe horned into this schedule, creating issues when delivery dates are tight or maintenance runs long.

Every operation in the factory is based on this schedule. Maintenance crews are formed and assigned based on the spaces left for their work in their schedule. Regular or line employees are given their shifts based on when they are needed, according to the schedule. Packers and shipping agents are brought in based on when items are meant to be completed according the schedule. Supply chains are synchronized to the schedule to minimize inventory costs.  Customer service and sales are informed of the customer delivery and lead time expectations.

For this reason, it is crucial for the production schedule to be as efficient and visible as possible while taking in to account the concerns and issues of each department of a facility. With the thousands of variables in a modern manufacturing facility, however, it’s usually necessary to leave scheduling up to a computer if there is to be any hope of visibility and predictability for the company.

Because the production schedule is such a key component in the operation of your facility, it’s crucial to pick the right program. A basic system that can’t take into account relevant process constraint data won’t give your company any added value. A good production software program will combine: accurate routing, BOM, past data on performance, maintenance needs, orders, and employee schedules and variability buffers in order to generate the most efficient and effective schedule for your factory.

A production software program should not only use past data to generate a great production schedule, but it should also be able to suggest ways to make future runs more efficient. Rather than simply sorting by due date it should allow you to specify the key performance indicators most relevant to your business at that time and create schedules to maximize that KPI performance. Production scheduling software has come a long way in recent years and failure to take advantage of this technology puts lagging companies at risk in this hyper-competitive global industry of manufacturing.