How to Make a Production Schedule

Production schedule is a plan that state when certain controllable activities should take place. Production schedules coordinate activities to increase productivity and minimize operating costs. A production schedule can identify resource conflicts, ensure that required raw materials are ordered in time, determine whether delivery promises can be met, and identify time periods available for preventive maintenance. Knowing how to make a production schedule is crucial to the improvement of operation efficiency.

 

Production Schedule Overview

Production schedule needs to be flexible. A good production schedule should consider the complexities of the modern manufacturing environment. Production scheduling can be difficult and time-consuming. In dynamic manufacturing environments, managers, production planners, and supervisors must not only generate high-quality schedules but also react quickly to unexpected events and revise schedules in a cost-effective manner. These events, generally difficult to take into consideration while generating a schedule, disturb the system, generating considerable differences between the predetermined schedule and its actual realization. When creating your production schedule, you need to add flexibility in the production schedule to adapt to the change situation.

There are different ways to create a production schedule. There are two key fundamental issues in the production schedule: the priorities and capacities. The priorities means that what should be done first? the capacity means that who should do it. Experts should done numerous researches on the issue and come up with different perspectives: the problem solving perspective, the decision perspective and the organizational perspective. Each perspective looks at the task of production scheduling in a distinct way and thus proposes a different approach to improve it.

Production Schedule Creation

Creating production schedule needs to understand the material inventory level and manufacturing capacity. One of the key objectives of the production schedule is to minimize the operation cost. During the process of planning your production schedule, it is crucial to coordinate the material inventory management and the machine capacity.

Production schedule needs to consult with the operation managers and personnel. During the process of creating the production schedule for the department or operation unit, it is necessary to gather relevant information from their perspectives and experiences.