Minimizing Your Down Time by Optimizing Your Master Production Schedule

Your master production schedule (MPS) is the document that keeps your manufacturing facility running smoothly. Everything is included on this plan, from the individual time cards of each employee to the total production numbers for the entire factory floor.Every change in every department has to be input correctly into the MPS. Of course, this also means that errors on this document can have catastrophic effects on an entire production facility.

Fortunately, a good scheduling software system can easily detect and avoid blatant errors such as over-scheduling a production line or under-scheduling staff. Determining if your program has created the most efficient schedule can be challenging. While older software systems would simply fit in blocks of production time around user-set maintenance shifts, today’s programs are much more sophisticated. They are able to take into account factors such as the effect of increasing staff, maintenance delays, and combining production runs. For facilities with multiple locations, they are also able to determine which facilities can most efficiently create and transport product.

The key to minimizing downtime is to have a production schedule that accounts for as many factors as possible. That’s why having the most up-to-date and comprehensive planning software provides a manufacturing facility with a big competitive advantage. An advanced planning system will do more than simply look at maintenance and staffing issues; it will also take into account factors such as weather, transportation costs, and the cost and availability of raw materials.

A fully optimized master production schedule should incorporate data from every department in your company. As orders are received, they should automatically be received simultaneously by the production floor. Production can be optimized to not only meet these orders but to fill them in the most cost-effective manner possible. An up-to-date planning system can calculate when an order should be filled so that it utilizes the least expensive raw materials, the shortest amount of production time, and the most cost-effective transportation to the client.

From an output perspective, this can mean that the MPS that is produced by an advanced planning and scheduling system looks very different than one that was produced by an older software program. Rather than basing a schedule solely around when customer orders need to leave the factory, a fully-optimized schedule will group production runs together by material and staff availability. Orders can then be assigned to the facility that can produce and transport those orders at the least cost to the company. This could result in a master production schedule that calls for many small production runs, or perhaps the production of a single item might be divided among several different facilities.

Optimizing your Master Production Schedule not only helps to control downtime, but it also ensures that costs are kept as low as possible. That gives you a huge advantage against your competitors.