What factors should you consider when scheduling production runs?

When scheduling a production run, consider factors such as demand, available resources, lead time, production time, equipment maintenance, workforce availability, efficiency and optimization, dependencies, customer requirements, and risk assessment. By taking these into account, you can optimize resources, meet demand, and maximize production efficiency.

In my experience, demand forecast is the last thing you will believe will actually happened. these days, having good accuracy forecast is considered miracle, but still we need to deal with it. Have an agreement with everyone which version of forecast you will based your operation on. From there, keep track on every change that happens, analyze the deviation and feedback to everyone your forecasted impact on the numbers that already been agreed. The most important is burden sharing. most of the time, sales people will pushed operations to produce something which never been in the forecast before, disrupting the schedule which impact to lower efficiency, higher changeovers, higher inventories. everyone need to respect the plan.

Demand forecasting (DF) though plays an important role in the production run but it creates a reference point in which all other processes should align. The accuracy of DF depends on many factors, but most of manufacturing companies focus only on traditional data points such as historical sales data, relevant product market tenure, and other data points. We end up with limited data points that does account for overall demand. The point here though we have a solid DF, we end up with uncertainties and variability and it is very important to make our subsequent processes more robust to beat the uncertainities.

Overstating the obvious, but customer lead times and what mode your business is operating in are very important considerations to setting a schedule based on forecasted demand planning. This allows you to create an achievable schedule that: 1. Sets your internal customer (production team) up for success, and 2. Still serves the needs of the external customers at a level of service consistent with your organization's commitment to the customer. High growth companies might not be willing to set minimum lead times, but with demand forecasted planning, any reasonable concession from the customer on order turnaround time will go a long way to being able to set a schedule pattern that your production team will be grateful to have.

In this scenario, Industry 4.0 comes into play; connecting your processes to the digital thread aids in accurate planning and allows for necessary assumptions based on shop floor trends.

Capacity planning is the first step of supply planning and I see this process as strategic level planning where uncertainties caused by increase in demand or decrease in demand cannot be mitigated. So while planning capacity, it is always advisable to breakdown the entire process into different sub-process or make the entire shop floor process as flexible as possible. so with increase in demand, we should be able to increase the line capacity by making necessary changes as required.

Inventory Management plays a very important role in production runs because the downtime or throughput can be drastically impacted by poor inventory management. In the context of Manufacturing, two different processes come into the picture, such as Just in time and Just in case. Both cases differ in the way - the supplier reacts to the requirement. Though there are different processes, the core concept remains the same which is Inventory management which depends on key parameters such as storage space, MOQ, EOQ, supplier lead time, supplier location, supplier capacity, Inventory policy, etc. Manufacturers should find a way to implement the visibility to hot spots for different inventory which is the key challenge for increasing downtime

Resource allocation can be managed by using analytic method to come up with optimization models to generate 1. Optimized schedule which tells which product and what quantity to be produced based on the availability of Inventory 2. Optimized workforce which helps us to reduce the resource fatigue and improve the resource utilization.

In Manufactruring, at high level, three important challenges are 1. Lot of untapped data 2. Communication/collaboration / Integration often teams end up with working within functional silos 3. Visibility - Personal should aware of important incident that are happening at other nodes which impact their operations. Solving the above three problems can improve productivity, Integration, reduce the waste, etc.. 2.