You may ask yourself, how does a manufacturing facility implement an automated Production Scheduling System? This depends on the specific need. Smaller facilities would do well to start with even a “manual” software-based production scheduling system. As with most Production Scheduling Systems, jobs are laid out as tags on a virtual “planning board”. Workcenters are listed down the left side of this planning board, and a timeline is laid out across the top. The tags for the individual jobs then list the job number, quantities, the customer, individual or master part numbers … just about anything needed for the individual using the planning board.

Behind the scenes of a production scheduling system is where a lot of other work takes place. Processes can be scheduled as part of a larger work order, personnel can be scheduled individually, holidays, lunch periods and shift changes can be accounted for, etc. Other calculations can also take place, such as the longer times necessary to bend or roll a thicker piece of steel, ensuring jobs don’t overlap where they shouldn’t.

A somewhat more automatic production scheduling system, using a certain level of artificial intelligence, can take a look at the current schedule and figure out the next logical places to run a given set of processes. It will break an order down into its individual processes, look at which machines are capable of running which process with which material, figure out the earliest a process can run and on which machine, and schedule everything as needed with minimal intervention from the production scheduler.

A production scheduling system which uses artificial intelligence to perform the bulk of the scheduling will be unique to a given facility. Using constraints based on fixture availability, the number of cells in a given workstation, or even the groupings of colors of the items being manufactured, the artificial intelligence will shuffle workorders in a large “shell game” looking for the schedule which gives the best results. Once this schedule is found, which may mean the AI has looked at tens of thousands of possible schedules for those workorders, the operator can then settle on that schedule and implement it.

Using a whiteboard or spreadsheet to implement a manual production scheduling may be the only solution for a facility for a while. But there are certainly more efficient methods for accomplish this work.

Cambridge Manufacturing Journals


Manufacturing.gov