Production Scheduling: The Critical Role of Information Flow

The gap between what people promise and what production knows

The scenario is familiar. A salesperson commits to a delivery date without checking current production capacity. Engineering discovers a required change after work has started on the floor. A customer calls to ask where their job is, and nobody in the office knows without making three phone calls. The job should have been finished two days ago.

These aren’t failures of effort or competence. They’re failures of information flow. Different teams are operating on different versions of reality, and nobody has put a system in place to keep those versions aligned.

Three flows — and the one that gets neglected

Rod Wong-Pan from the University of New South Wales framed manufacturing in terms of three flows: material flow, cash flow, and information flow. Most manufacturers have some system for the first two — materials are tracked through receiving and inventory, cash moves through invoicing and accounts. Information flow is where the gaps appear.

Information flow connects every stage of the production process. A sales order that doesn’t carry accurate delivery requirements creates a work order that nobody trusts. A work order that doesn’t include material status or engineering sign-off creates a job that stalls on the floor waiting for something nobody has chased. A job that isn’t updated when it moves between work centres creates a delivery enquiry that nobody can answer.

Rod’s description: information flow is “the glue that holds everything together.” It’s also, in most SME manufacturing businesses, the thing that gets built last — if it gets built at all.

What smooth handoffs look like in practice

The points where information most commonly breaks down are the handoffs between teams. Four of them matter most:

Sales to production. Sales needs to know actual capacity before committing to a date. Production needs to know customer priority before deciding what to run next. When these two teams are working from different information, sales over-promises and production under-delivers — and both teams blame each other.

Engineering to production. An engineering change discovered after a job has started on the floor costs significantly more than one caught before the work order is released. The information has to move faster than the material.

Work centre to work centre. A machinist who extends a run to avoid a setup is making a rational local decision. If that decision delays a high-priority job at the next work centre, it’s the wrong decision for the business. The only way to make the right call is to have visibility of what’s waiting downstream.

Production to dispatch and sales. When a job is completed, finished, or delayed, that information needs to reach the people who are managing customer expectations — immediately, not at the end-of-day meeting.

Bent and Curved Glass: what standardisation changed

The case study in this webinar comes from Bent and Curved Glass, a glass processing business that was tracking its DIFOT — Delivered In Full, On Time — and knew the number was 60–70%. That level of delivery performance is a symptom, not a root cause. The root cause was that different people were managing information about the same jobs in different ways.

The intervention was standardisation: consistent status definitions, consistent naming conventions for work orders, consistent date handling across systems. Not new software — new agreements about how information would be created, maintained, and shared.

The key dynamic that changed: when the production floor started updating job status consistently, the sales team could see it. When sales could see it, they stopped calling production to ask — and they stopped padding delivery dates as a hedge against uncertainty. When dates stopped being padded, production stopped having to guess which ones were real. The information became trustworthy, so people started using it.

Four things to standardise first

Status definitions. Start simple: “not started,” “in progress,” “on hold,” “completed.” Add more statuses as the team identifies gaps. The specific labels matter less than the fact that everyone uses the same ones.

Naming conventions. Work order numbers that carry information — customer name, product code, operation, target completion date — create traceability without extra effort. A work order number that’s just a sequence number tells you nothing at a glance.

Date handling. One date per job: the customer’s required date. One buffer: agreed between sales and production, applied once, in one place.

Update discipline. Floor workers need to be able to update job status at their work centres without extra steps. If updating the system requires more effort than not updating it, the system won’t be kept current. The easier you make it to record what happened, the more accurate the information becomes.

The trust that follows

The most useful outcome of good information flow isn’t the reporting. It’s the trust between teams that builds when the information is reliable.

When sales can see the production board, they develop a feel for what’s realistic. When production receives dates they believe are real customer requirements — not padded numbers from a sales team covering itself — they plan around them. When dispatch has accurate completion information, they can tell the customer something specific instead of “I’ll have to check on that.”

This isn’t a technology outcome. It’s a process and culture outcome that technology can enable. Start with the agreements. Then find a system that makes those agreements easy to maintain.

Chapters

00:00 — Introduction to Production Scheduling — Series recap and what this final session covers

00:15 — Understanding Information Flow in Production — Rod Wong-Pan’s three-flows framework: material, cash, and information

08:27 — The Importance of Reliable Information — Why information flow breaks down and what it costs when it does

13:13 — Stakeholder Contributions to Information Flow — Who creates and consumes information at each stage: sales, engineering, production, dispatch

18:17 — Challenges in Managing Production Information — The specific handoff points where information most commonly breaks down

23:00 — Standardising Information for Effective Scheduling — Status definitions, naming conventions, and date handling: the four things to fix first

28:30 — Building Trust Through Information Visibility — The Bent and Curved Glass case study: from 60–70% DIFOT to consistent delivery

31:47 — Conclusion and Future Insights — What comes next after you’ve standardised your information flow