Job shops and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that produce customized products face a unique set of challenges. Balancing complex production processes while ensuring on-time delivery, maximizing throughput, and optimizing resource utilization is no simple feat. In these situations, transparency becomes crucial, and an automatic rescheduling mechanism that accounts for finite capacities can be a game-changer. While many manufacturers still rely on Excel for an overview of production orders, resources, and operations, modern cloud-based tools offer far superior solutions. At Boyum IT, we believe these six key features are vital for driving business success.
A comprehensive planning board, usually presented as a Gantt chart, is essential for visualizing jobs, operations, and resources. By offering various views, you gain a complete understanding of the schedule. A job-centric view organizes your jobs in a prioritized list with sequence numbers. A resource-centric view displays all resources, including machines and employees, along with their allocated operations. Additionally, a resource group view consolidates resources of the same type, making it easier to identify available capacity.
Job shop schedulers often need to make adjustments on the fly, whether it’s prioritizing an important customer order or addressing a delayed job. The ability to manually intervene in the existing schedule, particularly through the planning board, is a crucial feature. This flexibility allows schedulers to respond swiftly to changing priorities.
An effective job shop scheduling tool should feature automated calculations for resource allocations, delivery dates, buffer times, and other critical elements, all aligned with specified scheduling rules. This capability ensures quick and efficient rescheduling across the entire production schedule. To maintain accuracy, these calculations must be based on finite capacities, enabling precise delivery dates and highlighting potential bottlenecks. This enhanced visibility allows for timely interventions, helping to prevent issues before they escalate.
For a job shop scheduling tool to be truly effective, it needs to seamlessly integrate with your existing ERP system. This integration allows your schedule to operate with real-time data and facilitates smooth communication across departments and stakeholders.
Effective scheduling hinges on understanding the availability of resources. Whether it’s human workers or machines, their working and non-working times must be clear on the planning board. This includes calendars that reflect resource availability, vacation times, and maintenance intervals.
A production scheduler’s focus shifts between different time horizons, from reviewing what’s scheduled for the next few weeks to conducting hour-by-hour checks of the daily schedule. A scheduling tool should allow easy navigation through these periods, with a time scale that can be zoomed in and out effortlessly.
With the cloud app Schedule, part of Netronic Manufacturing, Boyum IT offers all the critical features mentioned above—and more. Schedule integrates also seamlessly with our other cloud apps—Build, Produce, and Inspect. Together, they cover the entire production value chain, from concept to high-quality finished products.
Interested in transforming your production processes and achieving higher efficiency with Schedule? Book a demo to discover the value Schedule can bring to your business.
