Scheduling Effectively And Keeping Commitments

With constant changes in customer order details but limited capacity, shops need help managing output and, at the same time, improving customer experience. What best practices can shops employ to manage job scheduling better?

The capacity problem

After speaking with our customers, we’ve learned a few tips. We’ve learned the importance of knowing where your employees and machines are with each job to manage capacity better. Shops can better manage rush orders and frequent order-level details from customers by focusing on overall capacity and capacity at the job level.

Rush orders can occur regularly and take up to 30% of capacity. For job shops, customers can request changes day in and out. These frequent events could be detrimental for a small shop, especially if the shop gets a large order with thousands of parts from an important customer.

Because many shops struggle with employee labor constraints, it may be a good idea to maximize each person’s time by ensuring that they are clocked in and out consistently for both time tracking and job tracking purposes.

Knowing your actual capacity will help you manage lead times. Many shops deal with outside processes and late vendors. A solution that shows you a vendor's history, time, and materials could help you determine which external processes are costly and better brought in-house.

Scheduling and lead times

Managing lead times means having customer data and knowing their history. By knowing customer data, you can minimize the time you spend saying no to an order. Instead, with customer history, you can purchase history and what they need, so rather than no, you say, do you need this part now, or can I switch it out with something I’m giving you this week and move the current project out? Customers are generally reasonable, and most expect you to commit.

An ERP can help

An ERP created for job shops could also help with your scheduling needs. JobBOSS²’s quote-to-cash solution makes entering part information in the system easy. It also allows you to track vendor and outside process times. Additionally, data collection is simple and flexible for your employees. Those aspects together create a recipe for success for the scheduling,

Accurate data is the first step to scheduling well. Our Whiteboard scheduler allows you to see where each job is in real-time. Our What If feature will enable you to quickly commit to a new job by giving you visibility into shop capacity and helping you manage large and complex orders.

And when it’s hard to find the right labor resources, an easy-to-use, proven shop ERP may be what you need to retain talent. Just as you need a simple tool for your employees, not one difficult to use though packed with features and functionality, you need employees with character, who are teachable and whom you can train up, not necessarily skilled labor with years of experience but who can’t align with your business values.

Use a proven scheduling solution that you can set up around your shop so that your shop floor employees can pull up their schedules by department or ID and feel confident about their work priorities. Inspire confidence in the customer by knowing where their jobs are in real-time.

Use a proven ERP solution with user-friendly data collection to make it an excellent experience for your employees to track time and jobs. Couple this with an incentive program that gives employees a dollar-related reason to consistently clock in and out and do their part to ensure on-time delivery.

Treat your customers and employees well, and they’ll stay. Do this by creating realistic expectations. Be reliable and communicate well. Do what you say you’ll do; if you can’t, tell them beforehand. Being responsive within the hour is expected, especially if a customer says it’s urgent.

In this blog, we’ve shared some tips for effective scheduling by managing capacity and keeping your commitments. Join us again for more stories of how other shops are solving critical business challenges.

If you enjoyed reading this article, check out some of our other blog posts:

• Attracting and Retaining Younger Employees for Your Shop
  
• Common Roadblocks When Implementing The Scheduling Module In JobBOSS²
• How To Get A Positive Return On Your Manufacturing Intelligence Platform