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benefits

 

 . On-Time Delivery Improvement

 . Increased Throughput

 . Higher Resource Utilization

 . Reduced Queuing Time

 . Reduced Inventory

 . Efficient Bottleneck Management

 . Extensive What-if Analysis

 

 

  A White Paper on Scheduling

 

  Job Shop Capacity Planning

 
 

 

We claim that our scientific software, Schedlyzer is the fastest and most versatile scheduling tool for a majority of job shops. We welcome any challenge to the claim from other software vendors. 

 

 

 
 

 

The gain from free trial runs of Schedlyzer during the initial 30 days will exceed the total cost of ownership of the tool in many cases. We offer a free trial version only after configuring the tool for your production system (without any cost for you). 

 

 

Job shops are mostly make-to-order production units which try to meet a variety of customer needs with minimal lead times. A common feature of many job shops is high-mix, low-volume (HMLV) production with very limited resources. Some job shops may have project-based production. Custom manufacturing units belong to the class of job shops. Production management in many job shops is tough due to some of the following issues:

  • Unpredictability of the nature and time of customer orders
  • Production only after receiving orders
  • Material procurement times
  • Different priorities, due dates and quantities of jobs
  • Variation in job routings
  • Variation in process times across jobs
  • Simultaneous production of various jobs
  • Diverse jobs competing for finite capacity resources
  • Number of setups
  • Multi-functional machines and multi-skilled workers 
  • Constraints on machine and worker selection
  • Unexpected interruptions in resource availability
  • Moving bottlenecks due to changes in product mix
  • Unexpected changes in customer orders
  • Acceptance of hot jobs with high priority
  • Difficulty in assessing the ripple effect of changes.
An important objective of job shop management is to extract the best plant-level production performance from finite capacity resources subject to the above issues. Production performance of job shops can be enhanced by four complementary approaches:
  • Good shop floor practices
  • Increasing the performance and capacity of individual resources
  • Restructuring shop layout
  • Operational analysis and planning.
Good shop floor practices and popular lean manufacturing methods like kanban and heijunka are not sufficient to deal with some of the issues which are absent in Toyota Production System. Regarding HMLV job shops, Optisol's premise is:
Job shop production management will be more efficient with the help of (1) prediction of workflow, bottleneck occurrence and job completion times, (2) what-if analysis of production schedules and (3) proactive capacity planning.
Our job shop scheduling software, Schedlyzer provides the three functions along with a detailed production schedule by adopting the operational analysis approach. One of the most difficult decisions to be made in HMLV job shops is to find right start times for jobs based on process and resource requirements of jobs, due dates and resource capacities such that jobs will be completed by their due dates with minimal waiting on shop floor. Using powerful scheduling algorithms, Schedlyzer easily finds optimal job start times which greatly enhance production performance of the plant. In job shops with HMLV production or project-based production, Schedlyzer is useful for:
  • Generating a rational, feasible, operational level production schedule almost instantaneously
  • Determining a rational due date and a right loading time for each new order based on the existing workload and current resource capacities and capabilities (not by using estimates based on past data)
  • Finding optimal resource capacity enhancements over time intervals in advance for meeting some difficult job due dates
  • Determining whether a given product mix can be finished within a specified time
  • Dynamic capacity planning to finish the product mix within the specified time
  • Predicting workflow, bottlenecks and job completion times for efficient production control
  • Performing fast and extensive what-if analysis of schedules on computer even during production meetings
  • Expediting any specific job by optimally fixing overtime for some resources in advance without any adverse impact on the completion times of other jobs
  • Rescheduling high-variety production in quick response to major changes in the system like material delays, machine breakdowns, rework / rejections, job priority changes, etc
  • Generating daily dispatch lists for resources
  • Finding daily resource utilization patterns
  • Planning resource capacity for proactively mitigating bottlenecks, controlling job lead times and improving on-time delivery.
We would be happy to provide you with additional information if your job shop has any of the above requirements. This job shop scheduling software is also useful for project-based production in the same fashion. The same tool can be used for analysis and study of the dynamic nature of the production.

The ultimate benefits from our software are (1) significant improvements in on-time delivery, job lead times, customer satisfaction, WIP, shop throughput, and resource utilization and (2) ability to generate a quick, reliable, flexible and meaningful production schedule without exceeding resource capacity. 
 
We present a free live web demo of Schedlyzer for full details. Following a preliminary testing of the software for your data, we would offer you a free copy of the trial version with full functionality for at least 30 days without any commitment from you. 
 
 
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