Full Transcript
Scheduling is one of the most complicated areas of supply chain planning, and it doesn’t matter what vertical you’re operating in. In fact, most attempts at optimizing scheduling fail because they fundamentally miss the very problem they’re trying to solve.
So today I will ask and answer three simple questions. One, what is scheduling? Two, why is it so difficult? And three, how can planners do better? Let’s go.
Scheduling refers to the entire sequence of actions involved in a multi-step process. This process could be the manufacturing of medical equipment or possibly the repair of an airplane engine. Regardless of activity, scheduling is the structured, feasible, and logical order of steps that takes a process from start to finish.
Scheduling is a very sensitive and fragile process because of the interdependent nature of the steps involved. In a 100-step process, for example, all of those steps must be completed in a fixed linear fashion. Again, to be even more specific, if you were manufacturing an engine turbine, step 20 must come after step 15, not before.
Now, scheduling is also fragile because in that same process, if a single part, tool, or skill is absent, well, the entire process grinds to a halt and must be regenerated.
Furthermore, even though disrupted for any number of different reasons, people typically plan as if the only thing that causes this is the unavailability of physical parts. Now this is the typical bill of materials perspective and that naturally leads to very expensive safety stock policies.
Now this is flawed for many reasons, including the fact that scheduling is more than just the availability of physical parts. In fact, scheduling requires the simultaneous availability of every part, tool, and skill needed to complete a step in a process. These three resource types in combination is what we call a bill of resources.
For example, if you need 100 parts, 20 tools, and five technicians to complete a 100-step process, well, that means you need every part, every tool, and every person’s skills to be simultaneously available at the exact moment that you want to complete a given step in that process. In other words, if a single part, a single tool, or a single person’s skills are absent, you cannot complete that step. If you cannot complete that step, that creates financial losses.
Step one, move beyond FIFO. Although first in, first out is certainly better than nothing, the problem is it leaves a serious amount of money on the table. This is because FIFO optimizes based on how long a thing has been waiting, and not in terms of the financial impact of choosing to work on that thing.
For example, machine A might have been waiting the longest, but machine B is much more financially critical because of its role in today’s production deadlines. FIFO is simply not designed to give you this kind of quick risk assessment.
To learn more about optimizing your scheduling operations, consult our free white paper and watch our full-length podcast on the topic. The links to those resources will be below this video. And with that, get back to work.
