Why You Need a Manufacturing Software Tool for your Schedule - Part 2

Wasted time is primarily a lack of alignment between your people, the work you need them to do, and the materials, machines, tools, inventory, and instructions that will help them complete the job. Whether you simply need them to pick something out of finished goods inventory or you want them to complete a rather complex set of interlocking steps, you need complete control of every task on every job all the time to get there. It can’t happen on paper.

Let’s start with the queue of work for a single operator. On paper, that looks like a stack of job packs, a bulletin board with magnets or job labels. Perhaps you have an Excel sheet or an Access database that you’re using to keep up with it all. Either way, the minute you need or want to move something in the queue, every bit of organization you put into that tool or board is gone.

Production control for your people

True production control is planned in advance and mobile for the day. Production control cannot come from an organized workflow that doesn’t permit change. You need flexibility and visibility to be able to make adjustments throughout the day and as work completes. Let’s start with the work going as planned and then move on from there.

When work is going as planned, it will still move on its own path at its own speed unless you have a mobile assembly line with a tack time that’s set. These are expensive and don’t easily permit changes in workflow, so if you’re building to order or customizing your product in any way, you will likely be using a less formal but planned set of one or more individual stations to complete the work.

Suppose a job moves ahead as it should but it’s running slightly ahead of schedule. Nothing has gone wrong and your operator completes the work ahead of schedule. That’s a great day, right? In a paper-based environment where operators complete only one or two operations in a work sequence, this simple act of doing the work as planned can have a ripple effect on work the rest of the day and it’s not all good. Whether ahead or behind time, adjustments to the schedule cause at least one person on your team to have idle time - waiting for the next job, gathering materials earlier than planned, or even waiting to be told what to do next.

The impact is no less significant for work that moves behind schedule or stops altogether. For this work, the pause is more-pronounced, longer, and certainly more painful and costly. You may have someone on your team that does this work – spends their day scheduling and moving work around as required. As long as they stay with you and show up for work every day, you may have no problems but if we dug just ever so slightly deeper, even you would agree eventually that you’re putting all your eggs in one basket.

Why a traditional manufacturing schedule won’t work

That person that you’ve hired is going to be relying on you as much as you are on them. As long as you keep inventory moving smoothly and placed where it needs to be and counted properly, they can be set up to do the job as best as possible. The minute one of these things goes wrong – and we see them do it all the time – your key person strategy fails. This is one resource that you don’t want to waste. A person that can see the interlocking decision points and timing of the shop is a once-in-a-lifetime hire. Replacing them is costly and the ramp-up to getting a new resource aligned with how your shop moves and works takes months. Months that you don’t have.

Why an ERP can’t handle it

The best schedule that we’ve seen come out of an ERP is a worksheet-style list of jobs. It may be color-coded. It may prompt the next activity. It may calculate late work. The more options it handles, the more time-intensive often for your team. Your ERP has the routing and can certainly list the steps and place them on a calendar. If you deal with any of the issues we just talked about, however, this product just won’t be enough. You need both the visibility and the flexibility to do your work and while the ERP may have the first, it does not have the capacity for the second.  

What you need for a manufacturing production schedule

Look for a solution that provides an interactive production schedule – one that understands time, resources, and issues. It should be able to solve issues on its own by tightening or loosening the schedule. It should be able to send work to a different area to offload a bottleneck and it should be able to report the new workflow both to you and the operators that are affected. It should report both a shortage of resources (work center availability) and the outcome of it. Further, it should let you control what decision is made when a shortage does occur.

Ask for something that gives you visibility into each operator’s queue of work – what they’re doing now, what they’re doing next, and how your overall operator productivity is going. The work in any queue should be prioritized based on the current resources available and allow you to troubleshoot so you can make the right decision each time without having to rely on a single path for each problem.

Ideally, you want a system that is going to warn you about late orders, resource shortages, and issues before they arise. This is a complex process – handled by just the most rigorous platforms on the market. 

As always, we’re here to move the conversation forward with you. If things we’ve said pique your interest in what’s possible for your shop, reach out. We’ve been enabling paperless manufacturing for complete production visibility and flexibility for more than 25 years and we’re happy to share our insight with you.

Over the course of this project, we will identify critical issues we see, what’s causing them and what you can do to stop them. We’ll go through almost 20 areas before we end this series on how to buy a system. These pieces should serve as a step-by-step guide to get you there.

Ready to move forward faster? Engage with us to talk about assessing or mapping your systems and processes.  We’re only an email away, info@cimx.com.

Contact CIMx Software to see how paperless manufacturing can improve production scheduling for you.