When scheduling a manufacturing plant it is important to give the plant to correct amount of load to match its capacity. Over loading a plant (putting in more work than can be produced in a time period) is counterproductive. It leads to confusion among the production supervisors, frustration for the salesmen and wasted resources.
The method of loading a production plant is important to preventing this problem. There are two general methods of determining what orders to send to the plant.
1. Infinite loading- adding all the work orders to the operation schedule based only on the completion date of each order. No consideration for capacity is given with this method.
2. Finite loading- adding no more work to the production operations than can be absorbed in a given time period. Orders that can’t fit in the desired time period are moved back to the next time slot.
It seems obvious that Finite loading is the best method. Why would anyone deliberately load a plant without regard to its capacity? Actually, both methods may have to be employed in scheduling the production operations. Using infinite loading initially will identify those work orders that must be completed to meet the customer delivery date. If this load is within the plant capacity limits, the orders can be launched into production. If the infinite load surpasses the plant capacity, a management decision must be made to select which orders to start, and which orders to delay until there is available capacity. This should be a senior management decision since it directly affects the performance of the production operations and the customer relations. This decision cannot be left to production supervisors or even the production scheduler. Manufacturing and Sales input is necessary to select work orders and to advise the customers of their new delivery dates.
Once you have used Infinite Loading to identify the extent of the overload condition, you can address which orders to move and reschedule. To say, “everything is critical and must go on time” is to avoid the responsibility and to ignore reality. If senior management won’t, or can’t, make these rescheduling decisions, the first line supervisors will make them. Do you really want a first line supervisor making an important decision about customer on-time delivery when he doesn’t know the importance of the customer?
The issue of plant loading can be calculated by a production scheduler, but it falls to senior management to make the serious decisions about priorities of customers and the use of plant resources to need customer needs. Don’t avoid the problem, pretend it doesn’t exist, or hope that it will magically go away. Face the priorities and reschedule according to the management goals. It will pay dividends!
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