the 10 requirements of realistic manufacturing schedules

When you look at your production schedule today, how confident are you that your people, equipment, and materials can deliver what you've promised? That is the question you should be asking yourself every day and if you can’t answer it promptly, confidently, today we’ll shine a light on the 10 requirements for realistic manufacturing schedules.

Your schedule is not just a list of jobs and due dates. It is a blueprint that connects every area of your production team, from the people to the materials, machines and time. It’s a plan that reflects what you need to make, how you’re going to do it, what resources you have, and how long the work will actually take.

If your team is managing multiple jobs, changing priorities, shared equipment and materials, and a thin staff, here are the top 10 requirements you need to make sure you meet to have a realistic, and thus profitable, plan for the work.

• Accurate job information
• A defined manufacturing process for the work
• Realistic production times
• Known resource capacity
• Material availability
• Workforce availability and the skill to do the work
• Work dependencies
• Clear production priorities
• Accurate production progress, and
• Regular adjustments to the schedule itself

Let’s take a look at each of these, why they’re so critical and what you need to make them a reality for your team.

accurate job information

You need a clear understanding of the work your team has to do. They need to understand that, too. All of your work is connected (we’ll talk about that further down) and without a clear picture, everything your team does will cost you more, take more time and be less accurate. Key information for you to know: what you’re making, how many, the due date, and whether it’s released for production. If any of these are inaccurate, it affects the viability of the entire schedule, not just this job.

a defined manufacturing process for the work

Written, standard processes allow you to predict the way that work will be done, no matter the person doing it, and have the added benefit of driving the cost down and the accuracy up. To get the full benefit of this, you will need to establish the step-by-step process you want your team to follow, the sequence of those operations and the best work center (machine) to do the work. It should not only address how to do the work, but the set up and clean up procedures they need to follow and any critical measurements or quality checks you want them to make. These are the very building blocks of your production schedule; without them the operational dependencies (later in the list) will bury you.

realistic production times

If you’re able to tell your team how to do the work you need them to do, you must also provide them a guidepost for the time it will take. This is your baseline measurement for operator efficiency and tells you who’s performing and not. Excessive time spent may also be an indicator of issues in another area (think inventory availability or tool calibration). If you underestimate the amount of time something will take, it will wreck the complete schedule of work, so getting it right is key.

known resource capacity

You should always know how many man hours you have to give the work each day. This indicates both machine and personnel availability. The last thing you need to deal with is an unexpected backup because someone who has a specialized talent in your group is not at work today. Don’t forget that you will need availability of tools as well. If you don’t have this right, you will overschedule your team or underutilize them. Either way, you’re losing money.

material availability

Here’s where the “rubber meets the road” in your production cycle. If you have the right processes, people, time and job information, but you don’t have the materials to do the work, everything stops. Your schedule needs to know when everything is available, including material and if you’re not watching that moment-by-moment, your team is spending time waiting or looking for items.

workforce availability and the skill to do the work

Moving beyond your inventory, you need people to do the work. This is not dependent on who showed up today, but on who is able to do the work you require. There are many teams that do not cross-train their people, and so you need the right person for the work you have. An interactive schedule will know how often you need whom and when, allowing you to step out of the hour-by-hour babysitting of job production into intermittent problem-solving when required.

work dependencies

This is impossible to do without a digital toolset or a person that will spend every day scheduling and rescheduling work. Every single job you have is dependent on everything else going according to plan. Even in a single run assembly line where work moves from table to table, machine to machine, person to person, each member of the team is relying on the person in front of and behind them to keep the work moving at a steady and matched pace to themselves. You need to consider work that can be done in parallel, or work that must follow in a certain pattern. You can’t just choose what you want to work on or what’s convenient. You work in order that is dictated by the schedule.

clear production priorities

Priorities are critical to your shop performance and usually require a system to manage. It’s just not possible for your shop team to know the priority of every order in the shop without something helping them to highlight and track those orders and jobs. Priorities will change throughout the day as work gets completed and new “number 1s” pop to the top of the list. If you don’t have a system to manage this, people will often make choices you don’t agree with. It’s even more aggravating to shift something to high priority midstream and if you don’t know exactly where that job is and that you have the right people and materials to get it done, you don’t have control. Priorities also help you to manage customer commitments – both for yourself and for them. We want you to move work to the pace, performance and capacity of your team in the moment.

accurate production progress

If you have priorities and dependencies working in your shop, you still will not be able to move forward without an accurate status on real-time production progress. The single key to an effective shop is the ability to make decisions as you need to and, without that information, you are making in the dark. Production teams need to flex their schedules and their work as the day goes on and if you’re not able to give your team real-time updates to their work based on what’s going on right now, they’re making those decisions based on what’s in front of them at the time or their gut feeling, neither of which takes into account what you actually need them to do.

regular adjustments to the schedule itself

While we want you to automate the process of scheduling altogether, there are always going to be moments in the day where you want to insert a different direction because you know something that the system doesn’t. When a customer calls with a change order, you want to move your team to the work that needs to be done right away, not just to reprioritize, but also to consider any changes that the team has asked for. If your shipping trucks are running early or late, you may want to change the priority of one job over another to make sure you get everything loaded in time. These adjustments should be as automated as possible and should automatically readjust the schedule for you once complete.

the foundations you need

To make all this work, you need 3 things for your schedule:

• Knowledge of what needs to be done – accurate jobs, processes and times
• Knowledge of your constraints – the capacity of your people, machines and materials
• Controlled execution – clear and adjustable priorities, feedback and a change process

You do not need perfect data, but you need to know that you have a strong base of information that you share with your team that gives your team the opportunity to share real-time data back with you: measurements, visual inspections, data collections, updated operation times, inventory scrap, WIP, etc.

Most manufacturers we speak do not need the complexity of a schedule that requires them to update things consistently; they need the schedule to do the heavy lifting for them. They need complete information, realistic production times, accurate capacity information and real-time inventory and materials status. Get a schedule that allows you to execute on it consistently and then tackle optimization. You may find that the first step gets you everything you need and you can avoid spending more time on it, allowing it to move your production forward for you.

Get yourself to the point where you can be confident that your people, equipment, and materials can deliver what you've promised, and you will find you have a realistic manufacturing schedule. Ask us for help if you’re stuck or you still don’t know what the first step is.

You might also like: Manufacturing Scheduling: The Complete Guide to Realistic Production Schedules

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