Beyond Product Wheels: A 3-Step Guide to Dynamic Scheduling in Chemical Manufacturing

This is Part 2 of a 2-part article on Product Wheels (Link to Part 1)

A Case for Looking Beyond Static Product Wheels

In today’s rapidly changing manufacturing landscape, chemical companies must rethink their traditional approaches to production scheduling if they want to keep pace. In our previous article, we highlighted the limitations of static product wheels and why they often fall out of sync with market demand, leading to inventory bloat, missed orders, and reduced flexibility. This article continues that discussion, offering a practical three-step approach to move beyond the limitations of static product wheels.

We will delve into three key phases of this transformation: recognizing the signs of misaligned product wheels, building a more responsive and context-aware system, and ultimately transitioning to a dynamic scheduling capability that can adapt in real-time. By following this roadmap, chemical companies can ensure their scheduling processes are agile enough to meet evolving demands and maximize the value of their digitalization investments.

Step 1: Know When Product Wheels are falling out of Sync

Recognizing the signs that your product wheels are out of sync is the first step in improving your scheduling process. Companies need to actively monitor key indicators such as:

• Inventory levels: If excess inventory is piling up for certain products, it’s a clear sign the wheel isn’t aligned with current demand.
• Capacity constraints: If equipment is consistently underutilized, or if high-demand products are always queued behind low-priority ones, the wheel needs rebalancing.
• Service level failures: When customer orders are being missed or delayed because the product mix on the wheel isn’t meeting market needs, it’s time for a reassessment.

To effectively manage this, companies should adopt closed-loop analytics capabilities. These analytics track real-time data on demand, inventory, and asset utilization, feeding this data back into the scheduling process continuously. Closed-loop analytics provide insights that allow scheduling teams to:

• Monitor Demand Shifts in Real-Time: Automatically adjust production schedules based on shifts in customer demand, preventing overproduction or stockouts.
• Detect Asset Utilization Gaps: Identify when critical assets are being underutilized and suggest changes in the production sequence to maximize throughput.
• Service-Level Optimization: Ensure production plans are directly tied to service level agreements (SLAs) and customer commitments, allowing teams to prioritize high-value orders over less urgent production runs.

By continuously analyzing these factors and feeding the results back into the scheduling system, companies can catch early warning signs that their wheels are misaligned and take corrective action before inefficiencies compound.

Step 2: Move Beyond Static Wheels to Context-Aware Product Wheels

The next step is moving away from static product wheels altogether. In their place, companies should focus on building the capability to proactively refine product wheels based on changing market conditions. This involves understanding when existing product wheels are in danger of getting out of sync and investing in two critical capabilities:

• Dynamic Rebalancing: Scheduling teams must be empowered with tools that allow them to dynamically adjust the wheel in response to trends and changes in demand, raw material availability, and production capacity.
• Demand-Signal Integration: Companies should integrate real-time demand signals and sales forecasts into their scheduling processes, allowing the wheel to be reconfigured as demand shifts, rather than operating on historical trends.

These steps will improve asset utilization and help companies keep their product wheels aligned with market conditions. However, this is just the start.

Step 3: Moving to a Dynamic Scheduling Capability: The Future of Manufacturing

To truly achieve world-class performance, companies must push the boundaries of what product wheels can achieve and move toward dynamic scheduling. Dynamic scheduling solutions leverage real-time data and advanced algorithms to optimize production sequences based on changing market conditions, asset availability, and profitability considerations.

Advances in scheduling algorithms compute times and data analytics allow schedulers to work through hundreds of changeover rules, tank constraints, and other complexities unique to chemical environments. Advanced-analytics-based scheduling tools can generate schedules that optimize changeovers, asset utilization, and demand prioritization in seconds. With these tools, schedulers can not only create optimized schedules but also compare multiple schedule options and modify them in real time, allowing them to respond rapidly to new market conditions and operational challenges.

With a dynamic scheduling capability, chemical companies can:

• Respond Immediately to Demand Changes: Instead of waiting for the next cycle of the product wheel, dynamic scheduling allows immediate adjustments to meet spikes in demand, enabling companies to capture opportunities and maximize revenue.
• Optimize Asset Utilization Continuously: Dynamic systems can allocate production in real time, ensuring that the highest-priority products are being produced on the right assets at the right time, without being constrained by the limitations of a static wheel.
• Reduce Changeover and Downtime: Advanced scheduling technology can automatically optimize sequences to minimize downtime and changeovers, even as conditions fluctuate.

Take the First Step: Conduct an Objective Assessment of Your Product Wheels

Product wheels served their purpose in an era when market conditions were stable, and scheduling technology was limited. But today, the reality is different. The rapid changes in demand, supply chain disruptions, and evolving customer expectations mean that static product wheels are no longer enough. Manufacturing leaders must embrace new scheduling technologies and methods, transitioning first to refined, responsive product wheels and ultimately to dynamic scheduling systems that offer unparalleled flexibility and efficiency. Change is hard, as any change is, but it is a necessary step to stay competitive and relevant in the modern manufacturing landscape.

We urge you to start by taking a simple but impactful step: conduct an objective, data-driven assessment of your current product wheels and scheduling methodologies. This assessment can help identify inefficiencies and misalignments that are holding back your operations. By leveraging data, you can uncover where your product wheels are falling out of sync with market needs and where opportunities exist for optimization.

By moving beyond traditional product wheels, chemical companies can unlock the full potential of their assets, improve their service levels, and push the boundaries of what their manufacturing operations can achieve.

Learn more about our approach to scheduling here: https://insightshigh.com/advanced-scheduling/