Production Scheduling
Production planning is a very important task in production management to ensure meeting the customer demands and ensure the productivity of the factory. One of the most important things in production planning is to create a daily production ...
Production planning is a very important task in production management to ensure meeting the customer demands and ensure the productivity of the factory. One of the most important things in production planning is to create a daily production schedule.
Prospective users:
The production manager and line supervisors (anyone else) should be responsible for creating production schedule.
This practice can be applied to all kinds of factories.
ProblemS addressed
- Low productivity
Process
This practice involves getting all line managers to develop a daily production schedule based on customer needs and historical information about the lines’ productivity. This production schedule can serve as the baseline for the production monitoring.
Steps in implementation
- Develop a standard form for the production schedule – preferably in table format. This table should be drawn on a large board placed in an easy-to-see position in the workshop.
- Another version in Excel file should be created and stored on a daily basis.
- The table should have a row for each production line and columns of the time period (one or two hours).
- Each empty cell of the table is used to fill in two types of information: number of products produced for that time period for that line and cumulative number of products produced from the beginning of the shift during the production shift.
- The next-to-final column is used to sum up total number of products made in each line
- The final column is used to display the number of the differences between actual production and the target.
- The last row is used to sum up total number of products in each time period
- At the beginning of each production day or shift, clean the table and fill in the target number for the shift or day for all lines.
- Figures about the number or amount of products to be produced in the day will be estimated based on have longer term production plan, such as for the whole year or month, in combination of the any changes in the customer needs or orders which the factories received for a specific period.
- The production schedule can be used to track or monitor the actual production progress by filled in the amount of products which are actually produced during the working hours and for the whole days.
- Information about client’s needs
- Historical information about the productivity of the line
- Line managers to identify the target productivity for each line
- Large sized whiteboard with production progress table (in permanent ink), pens, and eraser available at the workshop
- Using white board and makers are easier to write, but also easy to be erased incidentally or on purpose
- Difficult to maintain efforts in capturing information
- Keeping historical information about the line productivity require good information system, either on hard or soft copy.
- Help to capture the productivity information for production monitoring
- Help to encourage the workers in each line to compete with the others and with the planned number
- Productivity levels- daily, monthly, annual.
Funding for the Factory Improvement Programme is provided by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs and the United States Department of Labor.
