Scheduling for Success

John Walters of 1-2-1 Business Consulting is back with some great points about the scheduling discipline which is key to success, but often difficult for many entrepreneurs. 

Every business and all individuals undertake scheduling in some form. It could range from creating a list of calls to make, things to do, through to more sophisticated demand/capacity planning.

Manufacturing businesses usually schedule: raw material requirements in order to manage the flow of materials to production, production scheduling to manage the flow of work, and shipping & dispatch to ensure that customer orders leave the facility in sufficient time to achieve on-time delivery to the Customer.

The point being that all businesses need to be able to schedule effectively if they are to be successful.

I’m sure that you can appreciate that as the number of variables: products, production orders, customers, and the number of people involved in the scheduling process increases, so does the complexity. It is for this reason that businesses spend considerable time constructing rules around scheduling in order to maximize efficiency and reduce waste.

Think about a company that uses expensive equipment and pigments in their manufacturing process. They want to maximize the available productive time of the equipment and they obviously want to avoid cross contamination (the effect of colors being mixed), and so they take great care as to how they schedule their production orders. It takes far longer for them to clean the machinery when they move from dark to light colors and so they try to schedule orders progressively from Natural to Black and then back to Natural to restart the cycle.

As you can see from the above scheduling requires discipline and order, and so companies develop scheduling guidelines/rules, and often try to automate the process as much as possible. Automation reduces the risk that Mary will interpret and apply the rules in a different way to Nancy, and so variation, a route cause of production inefficiency, is eliminated, but how do you build some flexibility into the schedule to accommodate the changes that will undoubtedly follow?

One technique is to build in a time slot into your schedule, but leave it unallocated and in that way you give yourself some flexibility to handle that last minute rush order that comes from your customer that is notoriously poor at forecasting his own demand. Everybody has at least one of these customers.

Spending some time thinking about your scheduling processes will often lead to significant improvement in your Operations. It can be amazing to see how creative people can get when they are being squeezed on capacity.

Imagine that you have a four Man work crew and that the individual tasks take 2 hours each. The total elapsed time if the jobs are done sequentially is 8 hours, but what if you could cross train the crew and that you could complete all the jobs in parallel, your elapsed time would only be 2 Hrs. Think of the potential impact on your scheduling and capacity.

I hope that you can see that scheduling processes are extremely important to all businesses as they can have a profound effect on results of the business. Take a moment to reflect on how efficient your scheduling processes are and take contact with “121” if you need assistance to evaluate and then improve your scheduling processes. We have the experience and we are there for you.

Find more scheduling and efficiency strategies in OED's Online Community, and via special events located at OEDGlobal.org.