Today, we begin a multi-part blog series on one of the most important, and most stressful, jobs in manufacturing—scheduling. With the shortening of lead times from customers, along with the fluctuations in capacity, maintenance, labor, and materials, it’s a wonder that most manufacturing scheduling works efficiently and productively. However, there are some tricks of the trade when it comes to improving scheduling processes, and in Part 1 we will introduce some of those.

Ask anyone in a manufacturing or project-driven company who has the most difficult job and without hesitation they will tell you: the scheduler/planner. Foolproof scheduling is critical to the smooth operation of most companies. Yet, planning and scheduling the workflow is like trying to juggle 150 different balls all at once. Only the balls are all different shapes and sizes, some move faster or slower than others, and while you’re juggling, other people are constantly pulling some of the balls out of the air and throwing new ones at you. (more…)

How do you gauge success in manufacturing? Most would say it’s a factor of profitability, and of course, they would be correct. But, when it gets to the nitty-gritty of making sure profitability is running full-speed ahead, shop performance is going to have a great bearing on just how that profitability is achieved.

Certainly, when it comes to the investment you might make in an enterprise resource planning system (ERP), performance measurement is going to be considered the biggest payback area you can achieve. The stronger an ERP system is in being able to measure performance on a wide variety of cross-operation variables, the better informed you will be about what’s going on within your production area — and where the best improvements will realize the greatest returns in profitability.  (more…)