Developing An Effective Job Shop Scheduling Process

In our post, "Scheduling Effectively And Keeping Commitments," we discussed the importance of improving scheduling. We've heard manufacturers saying that to manage rush orders effectively, you must manage expectations with lead time and capacity and know your customers' priorities. By understanding these things, with fixed capacity, job shops can move things around to manage both standard and rush orders.

In this blog, we will discuss the more practical side of scheduling, specifically the importance of establishing a process around scheduling that includes efficient management of work centers, emphasizing key aspects such as work center setup, data collection, and improving on-time delivery.

How efficiently are you managing your work center?

How many work centers do you currently have in your scheduling system? This number should be representative but manageable. Carefully planning your work center setup on the front end largely impacts the success you will have in scheduling. Your work center setup should represent your machines and workflow, but be a number that will allow you at any point to see your shop floor capacity and make changes on the fly. Perhaps you have a work center per machine type and additional work centers by workflow. Or if you have a manageable number of machines, you can set up work centers by machine.

What about data collection?

Another vital prerequisite for effective scheduling is accurate data collection. How easily can your employees log their hours and clock in and out of jobs? Your data collection system should be easy to use, allowing multiple ways for employees to find their IDs and assigned jobs so their time is not spent on administration or troubleshooting. The quality of data collection directly feeds into the accuracy of your scheduling system.

On to improving on-time delivery

Once you've aligned your work center set up with your business and implemented a consistent data collection system, you can move on to accurate scheduling, real-time job tracking, and delivering orders on time. Your scheduling system should be able to track the due date and the scheduled completion date by job. This visibility allows you to approach customers to reset expectations for at-risk jobs proactively.

Developing a key performance metric (KPI) around your shop floor performance may be helpful. While some manufacturers may choose to measure machine efficiency, others have started measuring by machine hours. So, instead of measuring how many parts you produce in an hour, you would measure how many hours your machine has run. Therefore, your capacity would be around how many machine hours you have to run jobs. Your targets would be how many hours you run your machines per shift. Employee performance is now tied to them hitting their expected hours.

You can, at this point, successfully run reports showing employee performance. Since employees now have a goal to work towards, they are incentivized to accurately and consistently clock in and out for time and job tracking. This leads to more accurate data collection, which produces a positive flywheel effect.

A job shop scheduling system

Thankfully, JobBOSS² has a scheduling solution called "Whiteboard Scheduling," produced for shops. We learned some best practices for successful scheduling from our customers and have developed a solution around those findings.

JobBOSS² lets you choose a work center setup that makes sense for your business.

When you process an order, JobBOSS² shows each job's real-time due dates and scheduled end dates within the Order Line-Item Detail. JobBOSS² even has a Scheduling Advisor that provides a comprehensive view of at-risk jobs and jobs past their due dates.

Data collection is also easy within JobBOSS². With an intuitive data collection feature and mobile apps, it gives your employees multiple ways to clock in and out. Employees can clearly see what's in their queue, increasing productivity. Using JobBOSS²'s data collection feature with smart financial incentives and an easy way for employees to correct data collection errors ensures that job tracking data is consistent and accurate.

JobBOSS² also has a series of out-of-the-box cost scheduling reports and the option to build your own scheduling reports with our custom development team. See a demo of our scheduling feature to learn more.

Even if you're not ready for Whiteboard Scheduling, you can take action today. JobBOSS² also has a Planning Board. While the Whiteboard shows you your capacity and gives you forecasting abilities to hit your on-time delivery, the Planning Board is more of a drag-and-drop experience, so you can still visually track jobs as they go through production on the shop floor.

In this blog, we've shared some practical tips for effective scheduling and improved on-time delivery. We've even sprinkled in some best practices for accurate data collection. By investing time upfront to set up scheduling and be consistent with data collection properly, shops successfully manage their capacity and improve their customer experience.