Production Scheduling

Boosting Your Production Scheduling Performance

Production scheduling is an important tool in helping an organization provide accurate, real-time schedules, decision support, and available-to-promise date and quantities. It is a manufacturing tool that is used to represent what the organization plans to produce expressed in specific configurations, quantities, and dates. It takes into account the forecast, the production plan, and other important considerations such as backlog, availability of material, availability of capacity, and management policies and goals.

What are the benefits of production scheduling?

The benefits of production scheduling include:

Planning: Predicting demand and matching that to labor, materials, and equipment capacity

Scheduling: Assigning workers and detailing contingency plans for when unexpected delays happen

Stockout prevention: Planning to maintain output, even if materials are delayed, or a swell in orders increases demand

Improved efficiency: Spotting bottlenecks and looking for areas of improvement. This results in improved lead times and smoother demand flows

Improved communication: With one master document detailing every element of the production workflow, communication is standard across the entire business