It’s the holiday season. You’re planning a big meal for friends and family. You’ve decided on the menu, selected recipes, made a list of ingredients, and identified the tools you need to actually prepare the meal. You’ve made a prep list, blocked off time in your day to actually put the ingredients together and cook. And in completing all these tasks ahead of time, you’ve given yourself enough of a base to finish the meal on-time, within budget, and in the most pleasurable way possible.
All this being said, what does job shop scheduling have to do with preparing and cooking a holiday meal? The answer is simple: The ability to successfully plan and execute a meal is not entirely dissimilar to creating table and efficient planned production programs to meet customer demand in a timely manner. Especially in short and mid-term planning, manufacturing companies have to account for the ability to receive orders, allocate resources and production sites, ensure inventory, and meet delivery timetables, all based on a number of rules and restraints in the production cycle.
This is where a job shop scheduling solution proves to be a crucial value proposition for planners and managers to plan for the parameters of optimized production programs ahead of time to combat bottlenecks and disruptions and ensure lean, efficient production cycles for on-time delivery. Because job shop scheduling provides a holistic view of program planning, manufacturers can deploy strategic, transparent, and agile production schemes that provide enhanced transparency across each touch point of the value chain.
Understanding the core of job shop scheduling
Realizing the value of job shop scheduling resides primarily with understanding what the solution actually is and how companies can leverage and integrate JSS into their existing planning and production platforms. he goal with both short and mid-term planning is the optimization of orders as they move through an often complex production environment. Rules, restraints, part availabilities, and production facility capacities can be altered at any point during planned production programs and often take place with very little notice or advanced warning. Planning of this sort, even in today’s digital manufacturing landscape, is still often completed in Excel or manually entered in comparable programs, which provides very little in the way of centralized data sharing and often results in functional silos across a company’s various touch points. Because of the rigidity of such planning platforms, inquires from customers about potential delivery dates or production capacities are addressed based solely on past production programs and not on current situations or capacities - in short, planners and managers lack the real-time ability to examine current production capabilities or create predictive models to create accurate delivery timetables.
As with our holiday meal prep example, job shop scheduling provides planners with a concrete path for efficient, accurate planning via: the creation of orders; the mapping of the associated machine, employee, material, and tool-structure; and the optimization of workflows for each job.
Benefits of job shop scheduling
Perhaps one of the most valuable aspects of job shop scheduling for planners and managers is the ability to execute control and precision over planned production programs - and the visibility and insight provided by a job shop scheduling solution into a manufacturing company’s overall supply status fosters a more responsive relationship between production, delivery, and customer relations. In order to achieve this balance, let’s examine four concrete benefits of job shop scheduling and how manufacturing companies can leverage these benefits for greater efficiency and productivity.
More stable planning and production processes. Job shop scheduling creates an optimized, buildable and reproducible production program under consideration of resources, personnel, material and tool availability. In turn, this allows planners and managers enhanced insight into potential bottlenecks and disruptions with enough time and maneuverability within the supply stream to combat said disruptions by adjusting planned production programs and timetables.
What-if and simulation capabilities. The ease of data maintenance and sharing within a job shop scheduling solution allows manufacturing companies to compare different job allocation scenarios based on actual orders or customer inquiries to make informed, productivity-based decisions on how jobs should be allocated and the resources necessary to complete those jobs.
Integration with existing solutions. Production planning doesn’t operate in a vacuum - nor does job shop scheduling. The flexibility of such a solution allows for easy, convenient integration with existing planning solutions to create synergy throughout the overall supply stream - in conjunction with the latest in intelligent planning such as Industry 4.0 and The Internet of Things. This synergy is a key driver in promoting a fully optimized production network capable of reacting and responding to small and large-scale disruptions.
Real-time production feedback. The capability to provide alerts, error messages, and other notifications in modifications to rules and restraints in production programs is critical to on-time delivery and maintaining manufacturing schedules. Job shop scheduling provides such notifications to planners and managers in real-time to foster more informed production decisions for increased value and productivity.
The end game for job shop scheduling
Just like how you wouldn’t make an important holiday dinner for your closest friends and family without some kind of preparation or planning as to how to accomplish such a task, planners and managers should not set out planned production programs in the short and mid-term without the tools to successfully facilitate a transparent, agile, and visible production scheme. Job shop scheduling allows planners to achieve these production cycle standards to leverage a more efficient and cost-effective supply network, but also to better understand the nuances of their supply streams via enhanced end-to-end (E2E) visibility. At the end of the day, job shop scheduling, while a critical tool for helping manufacturing companies fill orders and execute accurate delivery timetables, is really about giving companies critical insight into the strength, value, and overall condition of their value chain.
If you want to learn more, download your guide to Transformation of Manufacturing Processes.
In this Guide you will learn:
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Emerging Challenges in the Modern Truck/Automotive Industry
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How Can Global Companies Adapt to These New Realities
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How Decentralized Digital Systems Power Smarter Planning Processes
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How flexis Can Support Flexible Supply Chain Transformation
