Scheduling is an important tool for manufacturing and engineering, where it can have a major impact on the productivity of a process. In manufacturing, the purpose of scheduling is to minimize the production time and costs, by telling a production facility when to make, with which staff, and on which equipment. Production scheduling aims to maximize the efficiency of the operation and reduce costs.
Production scheduling tools greatly outperform older manual scheduling methods. These provide the production scheduler with powerful graphical interfaces, which can be used to visually optimize real-time workloads in various stages of production, and pattern recognition allows the software to automatically create scheduling opportunities, which might not be apparent without this view into the data. For example, an airline might wish to minimize the number of airport gates required for its aircraft, in order to reduce costs, and scheduling software can allow the planners to see how this can be done, by analyzing time tables, aircraft usage, or the flow of passengers.
Companies use backward and forward scheduling to allocate plant and machinery resources, plan human resources, plan production processes and purchase materials. In forward scheduling is planning the tasks from the date resources become available to determine the shipping date or the due date and in backward scheduling is planning the tasks from the due date or required-by date to determine the start date and/or any changes in capacity required.
The benefits of production scheduling include
Process change-over reduction
- Inventory reduction, leveling
- Reduced scheduling effort
- Increased production efficiency
- Labor load leveling
- Accurate delivery date quotes
- Real time information
