This webinar, hosted by Dynamic Scheduling in partnership with Qmani, brought together manufacturing professionals from across Australia to discuss production scheduling fundamentals. Jon Scheele (Blue Connector) led the session with contributions from Rod Wong-Pan (University of New South Wales lecturer with 45 years in operations), Sim Thiam Soon (Qmani Director), Joo Meng Quek (Principal at Qmani) and practitioners from precision engineering and manufacturing companies including William Sharpe from SQP Engineering and Ian Levitt from B&S Precision Engineering.
The session focused on helping business owners, managers, and schedulers from diverse industries including precision engineering, cabinetry, and woodworking understand common production scheduling challenges and solutions.
Webinar series: Production Scheduling Fundamentals
Watch Now ~38 min
What actually goes wrong on the floor
Every manufacturer’s workflow looks roughly the same at 10,000 feet. Customer order arrives, work orders are created, jobs route through workstations, inspection, dispatch. The materials and markets vary. The problems don’t.
Rod Wong-Pan — 45 years in operations, now lecturing at the University of New South Wales — opened with a provocation worth sitting with: “Everyone thinks scheduling is easy, until they have to do it.” What makes it hard isn’t complexity for its own sake. It’s that the same three disruptions appear in every shop, and most businesses have no reliable system for absorbing them.
The three disruptions every scheduler recognises
Rush orders. A customer calls and needs their job moved to the front of the queue. The job that was at the front moves back. That job’s customer calls tomorrow.
Bottleneck resources. One machine — or one skilled person — that everything has to flow through. When it’s overloaded, everything downstream waits. When it’s idle, you’re burning overhead and nothing is being produced.
Visibility problems. Nobody can answer “where is that job right now?” in under two minutes without making several phone calls. Customer delivery enquiries end up with the owner, because the owner is the only person who actually knows what’s happening.
What is DIFOT?
DIFOT — Delivered In Full, On Time — is the delivery performance metric most useful for job shops. Unlike OTD (On-Time Delivery), DIFOT counts a delivery as a failure if it’s short-shipped or late. It’s a harder number to hit than OTD, and for that reason it’s a more honest one. If you don’t know your DIFOT, start measuring it. Most businesses are surprised by the gap between what they think their delivery performance is and what it actually is.
The seven wastes — and why ‘waiting’ matters most for schedulers
Jon drew on Toyota’s production system to frame the cost of these disruptions. Toyota identified seven categories of waste in manufacturing operations, remembered as TIMWOOD: Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Over-production, Over-processing, and Defects.
For a job shop scheduler, waiting is the waste that matters most. You can rework a defective part. You can expedite a late delivery. But when a work centre sits idle because a job hasn’t arrived — or when a machinist is waiting for a setup instruction that nobody has issued — that time is simply gone. Lost machine hours can never be recovered.
Rod illustrated this with a real case from his consulting work. A warehouse operation was spending six hours loading trucks for dispatch. By mapping the actual movements — who walked where, carrying what, in what sequence — and eliminating the steps that added no value, loading time dropped to ninety minutes. Same people, same trucks, same goods. The waste was invisible until someone drew the map.
Three stages of scheduling maturity
Stage one: people-centric. The scheduler (often the owner) carries the plan in their head. Priorities are communicated verbally. When the scheduler is unavailable, the floor makes its own decisions. Works at low volume. Breaks as you grow.
Stage two: information flow. Work orders are accurate and complete before hitting the floor. Job status is visible to more than one person. Delivery dates are based on actual capacity, not optimism.
Stage three: work centre optimisation. Planning centres around the constraint — the machine or person that limits throughput. Everything else is subordinated to keeping the constraint running. This is where lead time accuracy and delivery performance become genuinely reliable.
What the transition to digital scheduling actually looks like
Ian Levitt from B&S Precision Engineering was honest about the experience: difficult. There is a period where you run both systems in parallel — entering data twice, watching the digital system show information that doesn’t match reality yet, waiting for the team to build the habit of keeping it current. You have to push through it. The temptation to revert to the whiteboard is real.
What made it worthwhile was visual deadlines. The shift from “I need to ask someone about that job” to “I can see where it is” is where the system starts paying for itself. Floor supervisors stop spending their mornings in a verbal briefing and start spending them adjusting for what the board has already told them.
William Sharpe from SQP Engineering framed it as a commercial question. Customers don’t just want their parts — they want to know exactly when their parts will arrive, and they expect that date to be accurate. Manual scheduling can’t deliver that reliability at scale. When a salesperson can’t give a confident lead time, customers ask for shorter ones as a buffer. When production can’t see the full queue, they give conservative estimates. The result is a date that nobody trusts, and a customer relationship built on uncertainty.
Where to start on Monday
Don’t try to fix everything at once. Start with the constraint. Identify the one machine or person that jobs wait for most often. Make sure that resource is never idle for want of work — that it always has the next job queued and ready before the current one finishes. Everything else in the schedule can flex around that one discipline. Get that right first, then build outward.
See it in practice
Angelo Petkovic Cabinets, a second-generation cabinet maker with 20 staff, went through exactly the journey described in this webinar — from scheduling on a whiteboard to running 20 concurrent jobs with full forward visibility.
Chapters
00:00 — Introduction to Production Scheduling — Meet the panellists and set the scene for the series
08:10 — Understanding Production Challenges — The three disruptions every job shop shares: rush orders, bottlenecks, and visibility gaps
15:22 — Exploring Waste in Production — Toyota’s TIMWOOD framework and why ‘waiting’ is the waste that costs schedulers most
23:01 — The Journey to Scheduling Excellence — The three stages of scheduling maturity and how organisations progress through them
32:02 — Future Directions in Production Scheduling — Preview of Parts 2 and 3: routing optimisation and information flow
Free Download
Production Scheduling for Precision Engineering — White Paper
A 14-page guide covering DIFOT measurement, scheduling maturity stages, Theory of Constraints, and real-world case studies from SQP Engineering and Angelo Petkovic Cabinets.
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