Ever wonder why some operations seem calm and purposeful about their work - and are running profitably. While other departments have staff in panic looking really busy but running late on everything?
Delivering late is really the capital crime of manufacturing. Customers won't forgive. So how do you fix this? Buy more machinery? Hire twice as many staff? Probably not. Efficient job scheduling can fix all of these problems while in fact saving money doing it.
Manufacturing is not easy. It's not just some simple logistics exercise. True manufacturing is a materials conversion operation. You're buying one thing, transforming it through a secret recipe that typically took decades to develop - to produce an end product almost unrecognisable from its raw materials. And you are likely producing hundreds of different product variations simultaneously.
As a production manager, you must coordinate the workload of hundreds of jobs, taking into account four main factors:
finite capacity and variable operating speeds of the plant/site/machinery
workforce labour roster
raw materials supply
new jobs added daily, with varying due dates
In a typical dynamic manufacturing environment any of these factors can change on short notice and push out delivery dates. Or create a quality issue.. If the right raw materials dont arrive in time for the job you've scheduled, factory staff risk using the wrong stuff! and quality is compromised.
If you are a Lean or JIT plant you 'wont' have all those raw materials in stock yet. Most of the plan will be 'pending' supply (to reduce stockholding costs) and you will need to ensure that supply is well documented with purchase orders and shipping notices of due delivery.
Most likely you simply wont have enough capacity to fulfil every job on time (if you had the luxury of spare capacity, it's likely an indication of low sales..) So adjustments will be required. An ideal planning tool will automatically load all of this work onto its recommended workcenters mapped by product specifications. But this is where the human operator plays a key role, using discretion to move some workload to alternate routes, labour or materials to alleviate pressure on peak times and places in the plan, reactively as required.
The key to managing all this is to be able to view all these factors real-time on one very informative screen display.
You need to be able to 'see' it all, to visuallise all expected outcomes, for the next month or so. ie. All of your workload, spread across all of its allocated workcenters, given anticipated working hours, labour availability and raw materials supply, with highlights of all Late conditions. With a clear visual plan, you can make sales commitments with confidence.
This is why MoreManufacturing developed Optiplanner, the visual twin screen capacity scheduling tool which brings all of these factors into one view, to review the interactions between it all on a time-scale and perform real time what-if adjustments. This will help you get control of your workload, and your profitability ..this has significant potential to directly affect your bottom line.
Ask for a demonstration. You will be impressed at how effortlessly this can be handled.