Visual job shop manual

Spent hours and hours getting it setup up only to spend more time continually updating the schedule. I also tried using free scheduling software including Excel. It also took a ton of time to set up and to keep up to date. I even tried drum buffer rope software. What finally worked for me was a visual, manual scheduling system including a very unique scheduling board.

I explain more below. We spend more time updating the schedule. We add more information. We update more often. We invest in software or add a module to our Enterprise Resource Planning ERP systems that provides a way to collect and analyze the data. But, adding more detail is not the answer. Sources concede that job shop scheduling is just too complex for software to do all the work. Liddell agreed. These are all complex relationships. You still need a human being to help you see the big picture.

And those guys are shop scheduling software vendors. But in their defense, software just can NOT take into account all the variability that job shops encounter. This is job shop scheduling: order prioritization, order sequencing, machine scheduling, resource scheduling When done properly, delivery times are met and resources are used effectively. A job shop that falls short on proper scheduling runs severe risks:.

Avoiding these risks makes job shop scheduling so important. On the flip side of the risks of having no proper scheduling system in place are the benefits of having one. We will shed more light on this later, but here is already an overview of them:. By now, you should have noticed that having a proper scheduling tool in place is essential. However, if you want to achieve scheduling success, just a tool will not do the job.

You should go for a tool that adds a little, but a highly valuable element to scheduling. Click here if you want to learn all basics of visual job shop scheduling. You heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. You also applied it many times in your life. Think traffic lights, brand logos, or emojis on your smartphone. Communicating by using gestures, signs or images is the most effective approach of sharing knowledge as the human brain processes information through images.

This insight cannot be ignored when it comes to understanding the success factors of job shop scheduling. Visual job shop scheduling uniquely combines the best of both worlds. It brings together. As such, it predominantly provides transparency and lets the scheduler understand the complex scheduling mechanisms that happen behind the scenes. We have hundreds of customers, who over the years have scheduled hundreds of thousands of jobs with just plan it.

As a consequence, over time we scheduled millions of tasks always taking into account any given condition and restriction. This job shop scheduling usage data is an invaluable source of insight for us and helped us to derive both job shop best practices and machine shop best practices.

When it comes to job shop scheduling best practices, we learned that it is useful to differentiate the phase of selecting a job shop scheduling tool and the phase of actually using it. Here is a detailed blog post exactly on this. It provides you with seven tips on how to achieve your scheduling goals in a high-mix, low-volume shop. Before we drill into the individual best practices, here is the one golden advice that we like to give and it had been said by Voltaire back in the days.

Do not search for a perfect tool. Resist the temptation which might even kill you. Go for an appropriate tool. You are a job shop. The only constant you have is constant change. Hence, your data will never be precise and exact. Optimizations require algorithms. Algorithms require clear and stable rules, and they require exact data. Otherwise, you achieve garbage-in, garbage-out. With going for optimization, you go on the route to fail.

Go for something that is made to cope with constant change in your job and not for something that is silently based on the assumption of stability. As most job shops face more than 1, tasks to schedule at a time, a project-centric planning board that just provides some manual drag and drop won't be appropriate either.

The typical combination of the volume of tasks and the velocity of jobs makes pure manual scheduling very hard. Watch out for a tool that provides effective automatic scheduling.

Automatic means: there must be some logic happening in the background, but no optimization. This logic must be tuned to deal with a high-mix, low-volume business. And it should be made to help you with what matters most: improving on-time deliveries.

We had this before. Job shop scheduling should be visual job shop scheduling. This is not just a best practice, it is a must.

No more words to say. We have seen it so many times: Companies undertake an enormous effort into selecting a job shop scheduling tool. We wish they would do as well when it comes to using it. Hence, we have a piece of golden advice for usage as well. This time, we do not need to quote somebody else. Job shop scheduling is hard work.

You need executive sponsorship, clear responsibilities and routines, routines, and even more routines. Introducing scheduling is not a one-time investment into buying some software tools. Much more important: it requires ongoing time to work with the software.

Make sure, you have the backing of your manager … and also make sure that your software provides you with some KPIs and statistics to prove the value it delivers. Yes, scheduling is teamwork. Of course, it requires somebody to build, manage, and run the schedule. Typically, this is the production planner or the operations manager. However, a great schedule and this is something you also should look for when investigating scheduling tools also can get easily updated.

This update does not just mean to add new jobs. Updating the schedule means also adding actual data from the shop-floor and hence adjusting the schedule in real-time.

This is something the operators or foremen should be held accountable for. Scheduling is no magic pill that you take, and all your griefs vanish instantaneously. Scheduling is an ongoing process. Here is the metaphor that we keep on using:. Scheduling is like a dishwasher. The machine will help you to achieve your target much more productive than the manual option. But you rely on routines to operate it. There must be someone responsible to gather the dirty dishes.

Another one is responsible to fill the machine. Then there must be one to select the program and to start it. Finally, the clean dishes need to be put to its origin. Then the same procedure starts again and again.

It is up to you to define routines to make that happen. If you manage to establish routines, which are permanently lived and which become a "natural" part of the daily business, then you will meet your scheduling targets using any appropriate scheduling tool. Visual job shop scheduling provides high-mix, low-volume manufacturers with a plethora of benefits. We regularly interview our customers what they get from using our software, and they shared with us six tangible job shop scheduling benefits.

Here is a summary of these benefits. A visual schedule lets you quickly see which jobs are running late, and which jobs are in danger of running late. It also helps you to understand dependencies and to easily spot bottlenecks. And by the way: understand is the important word here. Transparency enables understanding. Once you fully understand your schedule, the dependencies, and potential threats, you can easily take countermeasures, and get control of what is happening in your shop.

With proper scheduling, new jobs are added to your existing schedule automatically — taking into account finite capacities, your shop calendar, and potential machine downtimes. In the second a new job hits the visual job shop scheduling software, you see the realistic delivery date. This is what you can communicate with your client. Important is: this is a realistic date. The higher the WIP, the longer the lead times.

The answer is transparency. Precisely: visual scheduling lets you easily identify bottlenecks. However, once identified, you can apply countermeasures such as subcontracting and eliminate bottlenecks, which in your case most likely are just temporary.

If you manage to cut down lead times and if you keep your capacity at the same levels, you manage to get done more in the same amount of time. Another way of phrasing it: by cutting lead times, you can increase your throughput. If you combine these four benefits, chances are high that this will fuel revenue growth.

In essence, we observe that our customers — as a result of 1 to 4 — feel comfortable taking more orders in. Orders that they would have declined before as they lacked transparency and were in a constant firefight. Visual job shop scheduling gives you control over what is happening on your shop-floor. You have less fire-fighting, you get fewer distractions from unplanned incidents resulting in big chaos and hence you have less stress.

Here are two job shop scheduling case studies — of customers that successfully applied the recipes shared in this ultimate guide. The fist example is from Paneltech from the UK, and you can read the full Paneltech case study here.

Before using just plan it, Paneltech tried various systems. They ranged from simple spreadsheets to very expensive advanced scheduling software. Constant fire-fighting was the norm and Paneltech needed to set a plan in place that would be stable, which they could trust and which would stop the lack of productivity. In the first month of working with just plan it, Paneltech could run the shop without any overtime. With just plan it Paneltech has transparency on what is happening on the shop-floor, and is able to make firm delivery time commitments.

As everybody works with the same actionable schedule, the amount of fire-fighting and interruptions has significantly decreased. The return on investment was within 1 or 2 months. As everybody trusts the software, I get less interruptions.

This is actually giving me more time to focus on other things to take my business forward to the next level. Ciovita has been successfully using the apparel-specific ERP system iSync for all financial and administrative processes.

However, production scheduling always happened outside the ERP system. For that purpose, Ciovita built a homegrown system with Microsoft Excel relying on a lot of exports and re-imports. It was not visual and most importantly, it was not dynamic. With the transparency provided just plan it, Ciovita managed to get a better alignment towards production goals.

In addition to this, just plan it enables faster and better scheduling decisions resulting in increased on-time deliveries. Most important is: Each department can see the impact their efforts have to keep a job on track. Now, it is time to put the theory into practice. What follows is concrete advice, checklists, and to-do lists. You get concrete action items to apply if you do not just want to be a job shop scheduling theorist, but somebody who successfully applies scheduling to manage and prosper the own shop.

Here are three signs that your shop truly needs proper scheduling. Regard this as a checklist: if at least one of these signs is valid for your shop, do not waste more time.

Become concrete. Get it going. One thing should be undeniable: whatever approach you take for scheduling, the purpose always is to help you better understand, plan, and manage your production. If this is achieved, you gain a lot — as I outlined in the benefits section of this guide in all details. However, there is also a hidden cost associated with scheduling and I not referring to the cost of purchasing a scheduling tool. This hidden cost is the cost of updating and maintaining your schedule.

With a growing business, incoming orders rise, more and different machines are added, various resources have to be handled and production lines tend to be more complex.

All of this happening in an ever-changing and volatile environment as usual for job shops. At the point where you are more involved with updating your schedule than actually benefiting from it, you should think about a change. The more successful you are with your shop, the more complex becomes your decision-making. The more complex your decision-making, the more important it gets to have the following information at your fingertips:.

If your scheduling tool does not provide you with that information instantly, you should think about a change. How quickly can you provide a reliable delivery time if your top customer surprisingly calls and asks if you can squeeze in a rush order?

How quickly can you reschedule if your subcontractor informs you about a later shipment of the required material? If your schedule is too static to provide you with answers instantaneously, the likelihood is high that you answer short-term incidents with gut-feel decisions.

The result is a schedule that is no longer in-line with reality, of which the result is fire-fighting. This is what we call the vicious circle of getting production scheduling started. Here is the condensed version:. It makes no sense to start investing into visual job shop scheduling or any other solution without knowing what you want to achieve. Take these concrete actions to define your scheduling goals.

I suggest that you first brainstorm general areas of improvement that you want to achieve with implementing production scheduling. The trick is: write down a long list of ideas and them in 1st person. They should be your goals. Nobody will do it for you. Your goals, your investment, your gain. The trick is: make a ranking list, no priority classed.. This avoids that you add seventeen ideas into the priority 1 class, and then the remaining three into the priority 2 class.

Knowing your goals is not enough. You need to translate your goals into requirements for a scheduling system. Typically, one goal translates into multiple requirements.

My strongest recommendation is that you resist the temptation to try scheduling software on your own. There are solutions out there that pretend that they are super easy.

They give you a free trial, or even a free account with limited functionality. However, job shop scheduling is not trivial hence this long ultimate guide to it. This also enables you to challenge vendors, and to make sure that they not just have fancy websites, but that they are capable of delivering what they promise.

Here is the quick link to get us into a meeting with you. Let us know what your goals and your requirements are. With its intuitive design, Infor VISUAL Jobshop Premier provides an advantage to smaller manufacturers by offering complete control over operations, eliminating redundant data entry, and ensuring consistency and accuracy across the shop floor. Infor VISUAL Jobshop addresses the needs of small manufacturers with beneficial tools for managing operations and streamlining business processes.

Infor VISUAL Jobshop Premier edition streamlines workflow and eliminates the need for redundant data entry by integrating quoting, order entry, inventory control production, shipping, and invoicing. Integrated, real-time information and rich functionality from Infor VISUAL Jobshop Premier makes it easy for you to managed shop floor operations, review critical reports, and improve productivity.

Talk with a Software Expert…. Write a Review. Engineering Definition Define operational templates and combined bill of material and routing structures for parts produced.

Use dimensional variable attributes to drastically reduce the number of masters you need to maintain. Inventory Control Buy by the pound, stock by the length, issue by the foot, receive by the unit, and sell by the box with Jobshops versatile units conversion functionality. Reduce multiple stock IDs with dimensional tracking while ensuring you have enough inventory on hand to complete the job. Planning, Scheduling, and Purchasing Manage your material requirements by the job, by stocking levels, or a combination of both.

View requirements and puchase needed material from the vendor of your choice with the click of a button.

Schedule orders individually or collectively to view the load on your shop. Generate schedules for your work centers. Receive to stock or directly to the job.