This webinar, hosted by Qmani, brought together manufacturing professionals from across Australia to discuss production scheduling fundamentals. Jon Scheele, Principal Consultant at Qmani, 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.
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Summary
The Universal Manufacturing Challenge
Despite working with different materials and serving various markets, manufacturers share remarkably similar workflows. They typically progress from customer orders through design and work order creation, then route jobs through multiple workstations before inspection and dispatch. This creates a complex juggling act involving work orders, skilled people, specialized machines, and routing processes.
Common Scheduling Disruptions
The most frequent challenges include rush orders that disrupt existing schedules, bottleneck resources where critical machines become overloaded while others sit idle, and visibility problems that make it difficult to track job status or provide accurate delivery dates. Schedule adjustments consume valuable management time, while external dependencies like late deliveries or equipment breakdowns create cascading effects.
The Seven Wastes Framework
Jon introduced Toyota's production system concept of waste elimination using the TIMWOOD acronym: Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Over-production, Over-processing, and Defects. He emphasized that "waiting" is most critical for production scheduling, noting that when people wait for work or lack clarity on priorities, that lost production time can never be recovered.
Rod Wong-Pan illustrated this with a warehouse optimization case study where systematic waste elimination reduced truck loading time from six hours to ninety minutes.
The Journey to Excellence
Organizations typically evolve through three stages in their scheduling maturity. They begin with people-centric planning focused on resource allocation, progress to emphasizing information flow and work order accuracy, and eventually reach work center optimization where planning centers around equipment constraints rather than individual people. This evolution reflects growing organizational sophistication and the recognition that machines often represent the primary bottleneck.
Digital Transformation Challenges
Ian Levitt shared his experience transitioning from whiteboard to digital scheduling, acknowledging the difficulty of running parallel systems while emphasizing the benefits of visual deadlines and better job timing. William Sharpe reinforced the business importance of digital systems, stressing that accurate lead times and real-time tracking are essential for customer service and that manual methods simply don't scale effectively.
Success Factors and Future Focus
The discussion highlighted several critical success factors including systematic discipline in following processes, accurate data in work orders, clear communication about priorities, and continuous waste elimination. The webinar was the first in a series, with upcoming sessions planned to cover routing optimization and information flow integration across the entire organization from sales order to dispatch.
Key Takeaways
Production scheduling complexity requires specialized tools and approaches, as Rod Wongpan noted that while everyone thinks scheduling is easy, practitioners find it challenging and sometimes frustrating. Success depends on systematic waste elimination, investment in digital systems that provide real-time visibility, and building organizational discipline around consistent processes. The most effective approach focuses on identifying and planning around constraint resources rather than trying to optimize everything equally, while maintaining a commitment to continuous improvement as operations evolve.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Production Scheduling
08:10 Understanding Production Challenges
15:22 Exploring Waste in Production
23:01 The Journey to Scheduling Excellence
32:02 Future Directions in Production Scheduling