An Easy Guide to Improving Your Production Planning and Scheduling

If you are responsible for the production planning and scheduling of a business, you’ll need to learn a few strategies. These strategies can help you improve the efficiency of your production scheduling and make it easier to predict potential problems. Here are a few tips to help you do just that.

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Record Your Production Capacity

To improve production planning, you will need to decrease the incidence of idle production capacity. When the machines are just sitting there for long periods of time, this costs you money. You want the machines to run for most of your business hours. It is important to determine your production capacity so that you can know how to reduce business losses. It can be a bit tricky because production timelines vary for each product from the moment a client places an order to product execution. You have to balance production lines to fit all the needed products in your schedule. This is why you need to determine bottleneck processes and time them in the best way possible to avoid production halts. Consider implementing analytical algorithms to help you map out your processes.

Enhance Your Predictions

The basics of planning your production timeline include knowing which items you need to produce. You’ll also need to determine the quantity of the products needed. Then, you can decide the number of raw materials you need to create new products. This is important to know early on because it takes time to get your hands on the exact quantity of materials needed to make the amount of product that the client will order. The only thing you can do is look at past orders to predict future orders. However, there is a lot of missing data when relying on past orders for your predictions. Consider using job shop software as a machine learning solution that can take new conditions into consideration and process a lot of data before giving you a good prediction. This way, you will get the best prediction scenario without wasting time or money.

Avoid Planning Silos

This is one of the most common mistakes many supply chain managers make. If you separate production planning from the initial stages of purchasing materials, you may not even find enough materials to use in production. Even if you make the best predictions, you will still face many challenges if you don’t connect all the processes together from the initial stages right until the products reach the client. You can enhance this process by implementing a proper IT system to make all necessary information accessible throughout all the business operations. This way, you will have the right tools to break down planning silos and improve process visibility.

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To improve your production planning and scheduling, you need to get back to basics and identify the problem at each stage of production. The next step is to connect all the processes together so you can have a much smoother production line. Implementing some of these strategies will help you better manage business operations.