Production Scheduling Within Any Organizational

¶ … Production Scheduling

Within any organizational environment, scheduling is a critical tool. This is particularly true for manufacturing and engineering, where it can have a major impact on the productivity, and thus the profitability, of a process. In the manufacturing environment, for instance, the purpose of appropriate scheduling techniques is to minimize the time it takes to produce the item with the appropriate materials and least amount of waste. Scheduling is the process of integrating the use of machinery, staff, equipment, and materials to finalize the product. Production scheduling should maximize the efficiency of the entire operation, reduce costs, engender high levels of quality control, and provide the organization with the most return on investment possible (Hillier, 2010).

The issue of efficient production scheduling has been a challenge even prior to the Industrial Revolution. It was always important that project managers have the right materials, staff, and means to ensure that whatever was being built was done in an efficient manner. However, with the advent of computerized technologies, as well as the Internet, telecommunications, portable computers and devices, and other technological tools, as well as software, production scheduling has become even more complex and critical to the overall profitability of the enterprise. These new technological tools allow the production scheduling department to use graphical interfaces that often visually optimize real-time workloads for each stage of production. When combined with sophisticated pattern recognition software, automatic scheduling opportunities become apparent and can even be implemented in less time that it would take someone to manually find the opportunity without technological help. Of course, the more complex the end product (e.g. The number of steps or complex nature of those steps), the more complex the it solution must be. Some manufacturing organizations use forward and backward scheduling techniques that allocate resources (machinery, human, etc.) to interface with purchasing and inventory control, as well as increase output. Forward scheduling plans tasks from the time the resources are available for manufacture; backward looks at the requirements of the project and then moves backward to find appropriate capacities ((Lopez & Roubellat, 2010).

Essentially, then, there are at least seven important benefits to production scheduling that have been enhanced using technological tools: 1) process change-over reduction; 2) real time information that can be acted upon; 3) leveling of the labor or human resource load; 4) leveling of inventory issues, economies of scale; 5) greater accuracy for delivery promises; 6) reduction in manual scheduling efforts; and 7) dramatic increase in the efficiency of the entire production and manufacturing process (Chreitienne, 1995).

Challenges in Scheduling- When dealing with large-scale manufacturing or production issues, many involving millions of dollars in raw materials, labor, and equipment, it is important to be able to accurately forecast needs, production times, deliverables, and even the prognosis for quality. The more complex the procedure, the more information (data) generated that may be used to orient and analyze production issues. There are five main challenges to larger production and manufacturing operations that have plagued organizations for decades:

Budgets -- Often projects begin with a budget and schedule that ends up being inadequate for the needed level of output performance or the complex nature or integration of the product,

Requirements -- at times, there are projects in manufacturing that require the start of a process prior to all requirements and verification; as well as the potential inadequacy of resources.

Development -- Sometimes there is an overall development process with key indicators, but one variable takes precedence over the other simply through human error or focus (e.g. cost vs. quality, or technical performance over time, etc.).

Design/Engineering -- Simply because something is possible in theory does not necessarily mean it is feasible or achievable under manufacturing circumstances. There may be internal issues and theoretical constrains not apparent at the beginning of the process.

Project Design -- Project design decisions may be made out of marketing necessity before the relationships between costs, technical ability, performance, scheduling, and risk are properly understood (Kerzer, 2009, pp. 740-43).

Technological Improvements- it is not enough for technological innovations to allow for more scheduling opportunities, technology must provide functional capabilities to manufacturing organizations. There are three types of systems relative to technological progress within the manufacturing field: 1) technological systems (monitoring, scheduling, etc.); 2) production or manufacturing systems; and 3) customer systems (orders, follow up, purchasing patterns, etc.). Our focus is on scheduling systems, which in general take the data input and, through a series of algorithms, provide the most optimum means of utilizing materials, machinery, staff, etc. so that the finished product is on time and on budget. The more advanced the technological tool, the more it does. For instance, some can determine priority tasks, risks of completion, communication between departments involved in manufacturing, expectations, modeling of machine efficiency, and even adherence to productions and quality standards (Betz, 2011, pp. 170-4).

Because of the wide variety of manufacturing needs there are also wide varieties of technological solutions to scheduling issues. In most cases, the issues focus on efficiency and being able to adapt to a large amount of information that will improve resource utilization, do much more with existing resources, and make better decisions faster. There are a number of ancillary "tools" that can be used to inform, such as tablet computers, laptops, smartphones, real time imaging, etc. All of these tools improve based on the processing speed and memory capacity of the hardware platform, and the ability for the software to take advantage of additional memory and speed. The more computing power that can be linked together, the higher the performance level of the software and scheduling complexity. Indeed, when parallel task scheduling, for instance, is used, the even very complex and multi-stage manufacturing processes can be made far more efficient (Krueger, P., et al., 1994).

Different platforms, then, allow for different ways of implementing scheduling issues, all dependent upon the nature and complexity of the desired result. Some of the more common platforms used in scheduling are:

Enterprise Portals -- Web-based interfaces that allow for multi-departmental collaboration. Portals are partitioned to allow for key performance indicators, alters, to time constrained manufacturing efforts.

Production Planning Software -- Often a subset of supply chain planning, this collects real-time data from multiple sources across the organization's supply change; converting the data into information on how the raw materials are moving through the organization to create the product.