Production Scheduling is the Input and Production Planning is the Output: Time For Action

Production scheduling addresses the central questions of economics - what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, how much to produce - within the context of manufacturing plants. Thus through production scheduling manufacturers are able to allocate production resources so as to meet customer requirements.

Production scheduling software is designed for planning manufacturing production and used to prioritise and schedule production across manufacturing plants, machine capacity, labor resources and manufacturing processes.

Production scheduling enables forecasting and planning of manufacturing resource requirements and machine capacity utilisation. This is to conserve manufacturing resources - machines, labor, materials. Optimum resource utilisation can maximise productivity and thus minimise production costs.

Production scheduling enables planning and tracking of manufacturing orders across multiple areas of processing. Scheduling is based on order priority. Priorities for production are assigned for each processing area on each shift. This is to boost customer service.

Production scheduling software generates a production schedule detailing required production on each shift within each processing area The production schedule should be interactive, responding dynamically to contingencies in production at plant level.

Whenever a schedule needs to be amended all of the existing jobs on the schedule are impacted. So are subsequent processes for each and every one of these jobs.

Production scheduling software such as the Giraffe Scheduling System offers automated re-scheduling of production around machine breakdowns, amended customer orders, amended order priorities, delayed deliveries of materials or production running slower than expected.

Production scheduling software such as the Giraffe Scheduling System software automates the RESCHEDULING process. This offers tremendous benefits not only in the scheduler's time but also the accuracy and relevance of the production schedule to allocate resources such as plant capacity.

Vince Levenda's blow hard box:

Planning horizon      

very long run:        long run:                short run:               very short run:

plant variable         plant fixed              plant fixed              plant fixed

labor variable         labor variable         labor fixed              labor fixed

materials variable   materials variable  materials variable   materials fixed

sequence variable  sequence variable  sequence variable  sequence variable

Production scheduling

• production schedules based on order priority
• rescheduling to reflect contingencies in supply and demand
• there may be a rather large number of machines and / or a rather large number of jobs booked for each machine
• there may be jobs that run for 7 minutes, jobs that run for 11 minutes, jobs that run for 22 minutes, jobs that run for 5 weeks
• there is nothing sexy about depicting machines on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal axis
  (unless that is what gets your motor running)

Production planning

• process plans and required labor
• forward estimates for suppliers
• capacity utilization across plants and machines

Buying software

• buy software to address your most compelling business objective; eg. forward visibility of labor requirements
• choose a vendor whose highest priority is implementation in your manufacturing plant
• implementation is an ongoing, interactive process of training, User Acceptance Testing, software modification and technical support