Many manufacturing managers find themselves constantly at wit’s end trying to make sure the right customer orders are receiving top priority from all production work centers while trying to keep everyone busy. It seems that priorities change daily, if not hourly, and surprises such as equipment malfunctions, late suppliers and missing work force serve to cause overtime and sleepless nights. How to gain control of the manufacturing operations is a question often relegated to quiet weekends or long drives home.
A proven method to gain control of production operations is to develop a schedule or Master Schedule. If you set a scheduled course and make the course visible for all production personnel, they will know what to do. Make it easy to follow the schedule and people will take the easy way. However, there are certain principles in developing a schedule that must be followed for the schedule to be truly effective.
1. The schedule should have input from the Sales Department. They know best the customer requirements and can set priorities. To ignore their input is to court disaster.
2. Include in the schedule all manner of production, both customer orders and spare parts. Anything that takes production capacity must be included in the schedule.
3. The schedule time frame should equal or exceed the manufacturing lead time.
4. Present the schedule at regular meetings and hold all subordinate supervisors to the schedule once it has been agreed upon. The schedule should be formulated at the same time each week and include all known orders as of a start date. Orders that arrive after the schedule is started should be saved for the next schedule iteration.
5. Set rules for adjusting the schedule. Some things can be safely decided by supervisors; other problems must go up the chain-of-command for a solution. Once the schedule has been drawn up, hold everyone to its completion. There are all manner of reasons to throw out the schedule and fly by the seat of your pants. Resist this temptation. The temptation to give up on the schedule at the first sign of a surprise is the reason you have rules for allowing changes to the schedule. The magnitude or seriousness of the need for change determines how far up the chain-of-command the decision will be made.
6. Never schedule more than you are capable of executing in the allotted time of the schedule. This is a critical feature. If you are unsure of your effective capacity, under- schedule the plant and watch the supervisors come to you for more work.
7. Measure the output. You don’t have to measure each work center. That will be distracting. Measure the output of the entire production stream (what goes out the back door) or of a bottle neck work center.
8. Don’t add new production orders to the stream until you have seen output. The new input should have the same capacity requirements as the completed production. In other words, if you finish 25 hours worth of orders, only add 25 hours worth of new orders.
9. An important feature of the Master Scheduling process is the scheduling cycle itself. How often do you develop your new schedule? How do you include unfinished orders in the new schedule? What do you do when an order arrives after the schedule has been released to production? These questions must be addressed in establishing the scheduling process. To ignore these questions is to set yourself up for confusion or failure.
Following these guidelines will greatly improve the success of your scheduling effort and allow you to gain control of the production operations.
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