Ask anyone in manufacturing or in a project-driven company who has the most difficult job, and without hesitation they will say: the scheduler/planner.

It’s no wonder. Foolproof scheduling is critical to the smooth operation of most companies. Yet, planning and scheduling the workflow is akin to juggling 150 different balls at once. Except the balls are all different shapes and sizes—some move faster or slower than others, and while you’re juggling, other people are constantly pulling some of the balls out of the air and throwing you new ones.

It’s not surprising that many schedulers work 60- to 70-hour weeks and still feel like they need another 20 or 30 hours to get the job done.

Job scheduling function has a huge effect on productivity and profitability. It also affects the customer relationships your company depends on. Your ability to manage limited resources, satisfy customer demands, and respond to the ever-changing conditions on the shop floor determines, to a large degree, whether individual orders and the company as a whole make or lose money.

For example, how many times have you gone in and pulled a job before it’s completed in order to react to another, more urgent customer order? You know that prematurely pulling jobs will disrupt the flow of work on the shop floor. Plus, you have no idea how it will affect future orders that might be scheduled days or weeks out. Yet, you do it anyway because the customer is screaming and you were late on their last two jobs, and you can’t afford to lose their business. And within the next few days, the customer whose job got bumped will be calling and demanding that you expedite their job.

Unless you practice lean setup procedures, you’ve now doubled your setup time, lost several hours of production time on that machine, and increased the probability of higher scrap and rework.

Most companies try to solve these kinds of problems by hiring more schedulers to manage the chaos. But all that does is increase overhead costs, add to the complexity of the scheduling process, and increase the number of schedules.

There’s an easier, better, and much more cost-effective way.

ERP scheduling makes life much easier

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is specifically designed to automate, simplify, and reduce the stress of scheduling work orders in a busy manufacturing environment. As a highly sophisticated central communication hub for all the activities in a manufacturing business, its various modules handle everything from estimating to job scheduling to final delivery and billing, as well as the financial aspects of work generation, purchasing, inventory management, administrative overhead, and all the accounting. The result is a software system that integrates all the essential activities of the business into one nice, neat electronic package.

The benefits of using ERP software include faster cycle times, better on-time delivery rates, reduced administrative overhead, lower labor and materials costs, improved productivity, and more. ERP also enables companies to manage the numbers in real time (instead of at the end of the month or quarter) so management can make better decisions for the long term. When properly implemented, ERP acts like a companywide, ongoing process improvement tool that empowers the entire organization to become leaner, more efficient, and more profitable.

What does this mean for you, the scheduler?

At its core, your job involves making decisions. The difficulty is that so many variables go into each decision: the number of machines, part attributes, employee availability, employee skill set, the capacity of each machine, the work order, the due date, the number of jobs currently on the shop floor, and so on.

ERP software, and in particular a scheduling module, simplifies the decision-making process by making most of the decisions for you. It allows you to manage the entire job-scheduling process faster, more efficiently, and more effectively. Work orders that used to take hours and even days can be completed in a matter of minutes, freeing you to spend more time on the shop floor reacting to all the situations that come up in the course of a normal day.

How does ERP scheduling make your life easier?

Through a variety of features and functions, scheduling evolves from an exercise in frustration to a simplified, low-stress process that efficiently and effectively guides and directs all the activities that must occur on the shop floor.

The most important of those features and functions include:

Automated scheduling
Scheduling with ERP is completely automated. Once all the job and machine data have been entered into the router or project and other modules, the system automatically schedules the jobs for you. Simply enter a work order, click on a few buttons, and the system instantly schedules the job. Jobs that used to take all day to schedule can now be done in seconds.

Improved accuracy
Because ERP tracks what and how many you’re making, how you’re making it, and work in progress at any given moment, the system enables you to say exactly when the job will be done. With ERP, “safe” dates are a thing of the past, because you can tell customers an exact due date. On the sales side, this accuracy also allows for precise promise-date generation.

Improved visibility
Perhaps the hardest part of manual scheduling is tracking down all the information needed to make decisions about when and where to schedule jobs. ERP gives you complete visibility by storing all the data in one central location. Every piece of information about every job—from work order number to completion due date—is instantly available to you in a variety of formats. In addition, you can search the data using a wide range of criteria such as work order number, part number, project number, or customer.

Amazing flexibility
ERP lets you manage everything from individual work orders to every project in the entire system. You can balance your load across resources by instantly identifying which resources have excess capacity or excess load. You can modify the labor default schedule, including interjecting holiday calendars or schedules. You can easily create work groups and assign alternate work centers for a resource. Best of all, most changes, whether big or small, are made with only a few clicks of the mouse.

Fewer bottlenecks
A major source of frustration with manual planning occurs when multiple jobs stack up due to limited capacity. ERP reduces and in many cases eliminates these bottlenecks by making it easy to schedule the right job on the right machine at the right time. You can also reschedule a job at any point in the system and, with just a few clicks of the mouse, instantly see how that rescheduling affects every other job in the system.

Reduced costs
Customers often order the same item to be delivered at different times. ERP allows you to significantly reduce setup time by scheduling multiple jobs of the same item to run concurrently, rather than running them days or weeks apart, as is often the case with manual scheduling.

You can stop juggling all those balls because the system juggles them for you, performing in a few seconds what used to take hours or even days. Now, instead of struggling to get your jobs in the right order, you can spend the bulk of your time and energy responding to and managing current events on the shop floor.

By freeing up your time, ERP scheduling allows you to make better decisions and become more of a proactive manager of people and resources. It redefines your role, elevating it to a more strategic position and increasing your value to the company.

How ERP scheduling works

Our ERP scheduling module is a sophisticated tool that lets you efficiently and effectively manage the entire job-scheduling process, from the moment the order comes in until the part or project is completed and shipped.

The schedule can be completely automated or can require minimal input. The system tells you what parts need to go on which machines and when, how much material is required, whether that material is in stock or must be ordered, employee availability and constraints, and any other task that needs to be performed for that specific job.

More important, the ERP scheduling module enables you to track everything you need to know about every job or project in the system from beginning to end: labor costs, machine efficiency, setup and run times, work in progress, and on-time completion rates. In fact, everything you used to do on multiple spreadsheets, whiteboards, or in your head is now handled instantly and error-free by the ERP system. You can spend more time managing events as they occur on the shop floor and less time stuck in your office trying to fix things.

But the real power of the ERP scheduling module lies not so much in what it does for you (automatically schedule jobs) as in what it enables you to do by providing instant access to critical information.

Must-have macro features

No two ERP products are exactly alike; their scheduling modules can vary widely in their features, functions, and effectiveness. The best ERP systems come with a robust scheduling module that includes the following macro features:

One-time data entry—When you enter data for a new work order or project, the system automatically makes changes to the entire system.

Single screen simplicity—In many ERP software systems, making a change on a work order or project requires accessing multiple screens. The best programs allow you to adjust your schedule in one screen and see the results of that rescheduling throughout the system.

Multiple sorting capabilities—The best scheduling modules allow you to view, sort, manipulate, and report on the data according to multiple criteria. The system should allow you to see the data graphically and in list view.

Simple rescheduling—The scheduling module should not only allow you to reschedule a job with just a few mouse clicks, but also show you how that rescheduling affects everything else in the system.

‘What-if’ planning—Suppose you want to see the effects of a potential job change without actually making the change to the system? With a “what-if” planning feature, you can enter any number of scenarios to see their potential effects without actually changing the jobs in the system.

Finite scheduling—This important feature helps the planner identify and deal with bottlenecks and backups when available work outstrips resource capacity.

Schedule visualization—This is perhaps the most powerful feature in the entire scheduling module. By displaying the data in various graphic formats, this feature gives the planner unprecedented ability to determine what’s really happening on the shop floor and plan accordingly.

Every company is different, and certain features and functions that are critical to one company may be less important to others. When evaluating ERP software for your business, be sure to identify the areas that cause you the most scheduling/planning problems, and make sure the software comes with the features and functionality for you to properly manage those areas.

Graphic scheduling: Power in your hands

It’s not what graphic scheduling allows you to see that makes it so valuable; it’s all that it enables you to do. More than any other feature in the ERP scheduling module, graphic scheduling enables you to make timely decisions that cut costs, increase productivity, and enhance customer relationships.

For example, suppose a customer calls in with a rush job that requires you to reschedule several other jobs. After you finish rescheduling, graphic scheduling pops up a “bump list” that says, “Based on the transactions you just made, we have taken all these work orders and moved them out to the right. You will be late on these orders if you continue with this decision.” The bump list tells you how many days each job will be moved out so you can see the effects your rescheduling will have on those jobs and make any necessary decisions. Figuring that out with manual scheduling would take hours, if not days.

Not all ERP systems come with graphic scheduling. So when evaluating any ERP software, spend extra time test-driving the graphic scheduling feature to ensure that it has all the features and functions you need.

Ultimate visibility

ERP scheduling gives you the one thing you need to perform the job at maximum effectiveness: vision. Without it, you’re at the mercy of a multitude of different variables beyond your control.

Suppose a customer calls up and says, “This is Joe from A-1 Metals. Where’s my order? I need it sooner than originally promised.”

With manual scheduling, you get out of your chair, walk onto the factory floor, track down the job foreman, and ask if that order is running. If so, you have to determine when it will be done, which involves looking at the router and manually scanning the schedule of every machine and process involved. If conflicts exist on some of the machines, which they usually do, you must make some difficult decisions. Do you take a job out of the machine because this one is more important? You can make one customer happy, but you don’t know what will happen to the other jobs and their customers.

In contrast, ERP scheduling makes it easy to see cause and effect. You click on the customer’s job and instantly see the status as well as the details of raw materials and labor. You can see how much material has been issued for the job and whether it’s enough. If not, you can instantly determine how many parts you can make with the material at hand, and whether it’s enough to complete the job.

You might decide to run that customer’s job today and see how it affects all other jobs. Or you might tell the customer you can’t get them out today, but you can get them out tomorrow. If so, you can instantly see how much capacity you have for each machine so you’re not just making an empty promise.

ERP scheduling gives you instant visibility into every job in the system so you know exactly how any decision you make will affect other jobs and projects.

Your scheduling job is easier to control 

ERP scheduling dramatically reduces the time required to process a new work order and schedule a job. (In many cases, it’s only a few moments.) It reduces the headaches of trying to track down important data that are stored in many different places. It allows you to view and manipulate data in many different ways to achieve the most efficient and productive use of your equipment and labor resources. It reduces, and in many cases eliminates, bottlenecks due to insufficient information, poor scheduling, or simply being overwhelmed.

Perhaps most important, ERP scheduling gives you realistic promise dates. Manual scheduling constantly puts you at the mercy of the elements—inadequate information, lack of visibility, last-minute changes, and the overall complexity of the shop floor. ERP provides instant access to all the information you need to manage every job on the shop floor with precision, detail, and accuracy. Once you try it, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.

To learn more about ERP scheduling, call Global Shop Solutions at (800) 364–5958 or visit www.globalshopsolutions.com.