Scheduling Operations Management

Scheduling

• Scheduling is the process of establishing the timing of the use of equipment, facilities, and human activities in an organization, which can yield cost savings and increases in productivity.

Scheduling Operations

• Companies differentiate based on product volume and product variety, affecting how they organize their operations and requiring different scheduling techniques.

Scheduling Definitions

• Routing: The operations to be performed, their sequence, the work centers, and the time standards.
• Bottleneck: A resource whose capacity is less than the demand placed on it.
• Due date: When the job is supposed to be finished.
• Slack: The time that a job can be delayed and still finish by its due date.
• Queue: A waiting line.

Characteristics of Operations

High-Volume Operations

• Produce high-volume, standard items with smaller profit margins.
• Designed for high efficiency and high utilization.
• Have fixed routings and easily identified bottlenecks.
• Use line-balancing to design the process around the required tasks.

Low-Volume Operations

• Designed for flexibility and produce customized products with higher margins.
• Use general-purpose equipment and have variable routings.
• Each product or service may have its own routing, making scheduling more difficult.
• Bottlenecks move around depending on the products being produced.

Gantt Charts

• Developed by Henry Gantt in the early 1900s.
• A visual representation of a schedule over time.
• Used to monitor job progress and workloads.
• A low-volume tool used with load charts and progress charts.

Scheduling Context

• Scheduling is constrained by multiple system design decisions, including system capacity, product and/or service design, equipment selection, worker selection and training, and aggregate planning and master scheduling.

Scheduling Hierarchies

• Flow systems: high-volume systems with standardized equipment and activities, aiming to achieve a smooth rate of flow of goods or customers.
• Intermediate-volume systems: output falls between high-volume systems and job shops, with intermittent production and shifting product focus.
• Job shop scheduling: low-volume systems with many variations in requirements, making it impossible to establish firm schedules until actual job orders are received.

Sequencing

• Determine the order in which jobs at a work center will be processed.
• Priority rules: simple heuristics used to select the order in which jobs will be processed, including FCFS, SPT, EDD, CR, S/O, and Rush.

Test your understanding of scheduling operations in an organization, including its impact on cost savings and productivity. Learn how companies differentiate based on product volume and variety, and how it affects their operations and scheduling techniques.