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Scheduling of Multi-Skilled Workers
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http://optisol.biz/skill_scheduling/
Worker skills
are essential for almost every
organization that produces products or provides services. Since
labor usually makes a significant contribution to the cost of
product / service, companies which simultaneously produce a
variety of products or provides a variety of services using
various skills try to have multi-skilled workers to achieve higher labor
productivity.
Many companies simultaneously produce a variety of products or
provides a variety of services using various skills. Due to
high labor cost and possibly labor scarcity, they try to have multi-skilled workers
for achieving higher labor
productivity while meeting the demand.
Optimal utilization of multi-skilled workers in production is
very important for small companies to be competitive. The small
companies cannot afford to employ many single-skill workers.
If workload for each skill keeps changing
over time due to the varying workload of the organization which
can happen in many job shops, then also it is advantageous to
have multi-skilled workers as illustrated in the diagram
below.
Lean manufacturing methodology encourages training
of workers for multiple skills in order to increase the
flexibility of worker assignment, improve flow, lead times
and throughput. According to
Jun Nakamuro,
Taiichi Ohno’s focus shifted to providing the workforce with flexibility
and ownership to better match cycle time to customer demands,
particularly in high mix/low volume production line.
When workers possess multiple skills, the organization will have:
- More flexibility to assign workers to operations
- Less risk of facing undesirable situations in which workers of certain skills sit idle without work
while operations wait for workers of some other skills
- More productivity.
However, it is not easy to optimally assign workers of right skills to operations for getting maximum throughput.
In a system with multiple shifts for workers, long operations
may sometimes span over two or more shifts and right workers
have to be assigned to such operation in each shift.
The constraints on scheduling may include the availability of
machines or tools for some operations, precedence relations
among operations and certain time windows for performing some
operations. All such issues make it more difficult to optimally
utilize multi-skilled workers.
Many scheduling tools do not handle the issues appropriately.
Proposed Solution:
Our software Schedlyzer is very
efficient for scheduling production / service systems involving multi-skilled
workers subject to all relevant constraints. It
can easily handle all the issues mentioned above and
generate in a few seconds an optimal workload schedule and
the corresponding dispatch lists for individual resources. To
get optimal utilization of multi-skilled workers by this
software, the users must specify resource requirement of
operations in terms of skills rather than specific worker names.
Schedlyzer predicts workflow, bottlenecks and
order completion times in a realistic fashion. It also facilitates fast and extensive what-if analysis of schedules for any changes in the situation and supports proactive capacity planning.
The what-if analysis function of the software enables managers
to evaluate in advance the benefit of training a worker for
additional skills. Schedlyzer can take input from simple Excel files also.
The software helps the organization achieve the objective:
Get the maximum productivity from the existing
workforce and find cost-effective opportunities for increasing
the flexibility of workers.
A Free, Fully Functional, 60-day Trial Copy:
Practical utility of a scheduling tool for any specific
production unit
can be correctly evaluated by using it with real data for some
days.
For this reason, we freely offer
duly configured, fully functional, 60-day trial copy of
Schedlyzer Lite.
Contact us
for a free trial copy.
Before giving the free trial copy, we would first present a live web demo of Schedlyzer
Lite and configure the copy as required for your system. We would also offer you free help during trial runs.
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